Sending a request

A request is how work enters the platform. Open New request and give Kabaido the customer enquiry in whatever form it arrived. It reads the content and returns a structured response you can act on.

Naming what you are sending

There is one control above the box: RFQ, PO or Question. It names what your CUSTOMER sent you, not what Kabaido produces, and there is no Auto, because naming it costs one click and removes a whole class of wrong answer.

• RFQ is an enquiry to price. Every line is set out, matched against what you stock or service, then drafted into a quote.
• PO is a purchase order to raise. Lines are matched and checked against the quote they came from, then drafted into an order.
• Question is a technical or application question, answered from your catalogue and the engineering knowledge packs, with sources.

Which lines are design jobs is decided per line

You are never asked to declare that a request is a design job before you send it, because most requests are not one thing. A mixed enquiry of three stock items and one balustrade run is normal, and it is read as exactly that: each line is routed on its own, to your catalogue, to a service you offer, to a custom product you have designed before, or to the Design Engineer.

A line Kabaido reads as work made to specification, whose description matches a design module your organisation has switched on, is configured and priced by the Design Engineer inside the same answer; see the Design Engineer module page. A few lines of one request can be designed this way; beyond that the rest carry the made to specification card so a very long cutting list never turns into a run of configurations nobody asked for.

Handing a line to the Design Engineer yourself

Where Kabaido did not design a line and you know it should be, the override is on the line itself. Any line read as made to specification carries a Design this line button, and the whole request can be handed over from the made to order card. The Design Engineer then answers inside the same conversation, and that design conversation is also stored as its own thread, so it can be reopened, searched and continued on its own.

What you can send

• Typed text or a plain paste of an enquiry into the composer.
• A PDF of the request, whether it has a text layer or is a scan.
• A drawing as a PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, read by vision.
• A spreadsheet (XLSX, XLS or CSV), read as an addressable table.
• A Word document or plain text.
• An email saved as EML, or as an Outlook item (MSG) with the documents inside it read too.
• A DXF, read as a measured summary: the extents, the pierce and entity counts, the layers and the text printed on the drawing. Long drawings are truncated at 60 text entries, and the summary says so.

You can attach more than one file and add a note. Kabaido treats the whole request as one document and keeps track of where each value came from.

Everything you send stays with the conversation. The attachments appear on your message as chips you can open: a PDF or an image opens in a viewer inside the platform, anything else downloads. Come back to the thread in six months and the drawing the quote was built from is still one press away.

What is not read, and why

3D solids (STEP, IGES, SLDPRT, Parasolid, STL) are refused with a notice naming what would work instead. They are models rather than requests: nothing on them is dimensioned or annotated in the way a quote has to cite. Export the part as a DXF or a PDF drawing, or state the sizes in the message.

Scanned documents and vision

PDF pages with a text layer are read as text. Scanned pages and attached drawings are read by vision, which is metered per page: in Sales the free plan reads up to 2 vision pages per request and paid plans up to 20. Pages beyond the cap are skipped with a warning rather than silently dropped.

In a design conversation a drawing is transcribed first, into the dimensions, notes and call-outs printed on it, and the transcription is shown in the thread before anything is configured from it. That is deliberate: cite or abstain means a value has to be traceable to words, and a picture carries none until they are written down. Check the transcription against the drawing before the quote goes out.

Four drawings are transcribed per message, which is a drawing with its sections and two details. Attach more and the extras are named in the reply rather than read in silence; send them in a follow up message.

Integrations and other ways requests arrive

The Integrations menu beside the composer shows the channels that feed this interface, one line each with a switch. The Email agent is live: connect a Gmail or Microsoft 365 inbox and detected enquiries become requests automatically, with drafted replies. Anything your organisation has already connected leads the list, and See all integrations opens the full directory. See the email agent page in Integrations.

• An inbound endpoint: a tokenised URL any system can post enquiry text to. See inbound endpoints.
• The REST API: POST /api/v1/requests opens a request from your own systems.
• An AI assistant over the MCP connector, where create_request raises a thread your team sees.

Kabaido is useful before you import anything. Send a request with no catalogue and you still get a structured specification back. Once your products are imported, matching switches on.