Mobile apps

CPQ ships four separate Android apps rather than one, each built for a different audience: your sales team, your customers, your channel partners and your field technicians. Staff — reps and technicians — sign in with their CPQ user account; customers and partners sign in with their own portal accounts, on separate routes, so neither ever gets near the internal app.

All four talk to the same mobile API — a layer of its own alongside the web API, returning lean, phone-shaped payloads rather than full web responses. The sales app’s read-heavy lists are cached server-side and invalidated when you change something, so a catalogue or customer list comes back quickly on a thin connection.

CPQ Sales

For reps and sales managers, signed in with their CPQ user account. It is the widest of the four.

Dashboard. The numbers you want first thing: pipeline value, quotes this month, win rate, revenue, open orders, pending tasks and how many approvals are waiting — with your most recent quotes underneath and quick actions into the rest of the app.

Customers. Browse and search the customer list, open a customer to see their details and their quotes, and create a new customer from the phone.

Quotes. List and filter your quotes, and open one for the full picture — lines, totals, customer, status. The PDF preview screen gives you the real branded document to download, share or attach to an email; see Quote delivery.

The quote menu also offers Edit and Duplicate. Edit reopens the quote in the wizard already loaded with that quote’s own customer and line items, but neither action’s save is accepted at present — see What still needs the web app.

The menu’s Convert to Order runs the same conversion the web app does, which means it creates a contract from an accepted quote, not a sales order — the label is wrong, the behaviour is the documented one (Orders & contracts). It only works on a quote the customer has accepted; on anything else nothing happens and the quote is left alone.

Products. The catalogue with search and categories, a product detail view with its pricing, and a form to add a product.

Orders. Your orders with their headline figures, an order’s lines, and the two actions that matter away from a desk: move an order’s status on, or cancel it.

Tasks. Your own follow-ups, plus pending and overdue views, with complete and cancel.

Deal rooms. A room per deal with its members and a message thread, so the conversation around a quote lives next to the quote.

Approvals. Managers get an extra Approvals item in the menu — pending, approved and rejected requests with the quote, customer, amount and discount on each card. It is a view of the queue; the decision itself is still a web-app job (see What still needs the web app).

The Approvals menu item is role-gated: it appears only for users whose role reads as manager-like — manager, admin, director, owner, head or lead. Everyone else gets the rep’s menu.

Customer Portal

For your customers, on their own portal login — the same portal account described in Portals, in a phone app. It is the only channel that portal account can currently be used from.

A customer can see their dashboard, their quotes (including the quote PDF) and orders, and follow their contracts, subscriptions and assets — the last with warranty detail. Documents holds the files shared with them, with download. Request a quote lets a customer assemble a request from your active product catalogue and send it in as a draft quote for you to price; it is gated on the create quotes permission on their portal account.

An order shows a progress trail alongside its detail and its invoice. That trail is worked out from the order’s own status rather than from carrier events, so it tells the customer where the order is in your process, not where the van is.

Invoices & billing is the fullest part: the invoice list, an outstanding balance summary, an invoice with its lines and its PDF, payment history per invoice and across the account, and a form to record a payment made. That last one records the payment as pending verification — it tells you the customer says they have paid, and the invoice balance only moves once someone confirms it. It is not a card checkout.

Support tickets lets a customer raise a ticket, follow it and add comments to the thread.

One gap worth knowing before you point customers at the app: the Accept, Decline and Request changes buttons on a quote do not currently record the decision. Until that is fixed, send customers the quote’s share link for acceptance — see Quote delivery.

Partner Hub

For channel partners, on a partner portal login. The app is laid out the way you would expect — dashboard, the customers registered to the partner, their quotes and orders, commissions, deal registrations, notifications, profile and settings, plus a quote builder — and signing in works.

It is not usable yet. Behind those screens the partner API is written against a set of tables and columns the CPQ database does not have, so nearly every screen fails as soon as it loads. Two of the menu items — Documents and Support — already say as much on screen. The browser partner portal does not run either, so register and approve partner deals in CPQ itself for now — see Opportunities & partners.

Field Service

For technicians and their dispatchers, signed in with a CPQ user account. This is the most operationally complete of the four apps.

Work orders are the centre of it. A technician sees the jobs assigned to them; manager-like roles get an All work orders view across the company. A job is walked through its whole lifecycle from the phone: accept it, start travel, check in on arrival with your coordinates, start work, put it on hold and resume, complete it with closing notes and a signature captured on the screen, then check out. Jobs can also be cancelled with a reason. Along the way you can add notes, record the parts you used and attach photos.

Time is tracked for you rather than typed in: starting travel opens a travel entry, starting work opens a work entry, and holding, completing or checking out closes whatever is open — so the job’s total minutes are on the record without anyone filling in a timesheet line.

Around that sit Schedule, Customers, Assets (with each asset’s service history), Service tickets (status changes and replies into the ticket thread), a Parts catalogue with your own usage, Check-in / check-out for site visits, Timesheets, Documents and a Reports summary.

The scoping rule is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the menu: a technician’s requests only ever return their own assignments, and the company-wide view is refused unless the signed-in user holds a manager-like role.

Working offline

Be clear-eyed about what “offline” means here today.

The sales app keeps a local database on the device and runs a background sync — every fifteen minutes when there is a connection, immediately when a connection comes back, and immediately after a local change. Each sync pushes anything queued and then pulls everything that changed on the server since the last successful run: quotes, customers and products. Each queued change is applied independently on the server, so one rejected change cannot take the rest of the batch down with it.

What that local copy is not, yet, is an offline mode. The screens still read live from the API, so with no connection the app shows its usual error state rather than the cached data, and nothing you type is queued for later. Treat the sales app as an online app with a warm cache, and expect a signal.

The other three apps do not sync at all — they read live.

Out on the road

Nearby customers in the sales app uses the phone’s real GPS. Grant location permission and it lists the customers around you in kilometres, nearest first, with the phone number to call. From a card you can check in — which stamps a visit with your coordinates — and later check out with an outcome and notes, so the visit is on the customer’s record rather than in your head.

One prerequisite: a customer only appears in Nearby if latitude and longitude are recorded on their record. Customers without coordinates are invisible to the screen no matter how close you are standing.

The field service app has its own check-in / check-out, tied to work orders and visits rather than to sales calls.

Notifications

The sales, Partner Hub and Field Service apps share one in-app notification centre, with an unread badge, mark-one-read and mark-all-read. The Customer Portal app is different: its notifications are a read-only feed derived from the customer’s own records — quotes awaiting action, invoices due, renewals, ticket updates — with no read state to mark. The sales app’s settings also carry notification preferences — a push switch plus per-category toggles — saved back to your profile.

Push notifications are not delivered. The API accepts a device registration and the switch saves, but no push provider is connected on the server, so nothing arrives on the lock screen. Notifications are waiting for you when you next open the app. Plan around that: mobile is not yet a way to reach someone urgently.

AI on the phone

The sales app has an AI pricing screen on a quote. The analysis behind it is a rule-of-thumb score derived from the quote itself — its discount, its status, its value and the customer’s segment — not a trained model, and the screen and the API do not currently agree on the shape of the answer, so it renders empty. The AI features that are worth using today are the ones in the web app; see AI assistance.

What still needs the web app

A short, honest list of things you will reach for on a phone and have to finish at a desk:

• Creating, editing or duplicating a quote. The sales app’s quote wizard builds the quote correctly, but neither the create nor the edit save is accepted, and Duplicate does not go through either. Raise and revise quotes on the web; the phone is for reading a quote, converting it and handing out its PDF.
• Approving or rejecting. The approvals queue reads fine; the decision does not go through from the app.
• Emailing a quote to the customer. The Send to customer menu item does not send, and reports nothing back either way. Use the PDF preview’s download, share or email actions, or send the quote properly from the web app — Quote delivery.
• Capturing an e-signature. The signature pad in the sales app is not wired to a signature request. E-signature is captured through the quote share link.
• A customer accepting or declining a quote from the Customer Portal app, as noted above.

Connects to

• Quotes & approvals — what the sales app’s quote and approval screens are showing you.
• Quote delivery & e-signature — the PDF the app hands out, and the send that has to happen on the web.
• Portals — the customer and partner self-service accounts the two customer-facing apps sign in with.
• Billing & payments — the invoices and payments the Customer Portal app surfaces.