Quote Automation lets wxrks calculate a project's cost and move it straight to Pending as soon as its files finish processing — without anyone needing to open the project and quote it by hand. It's especially useful for projects your clients or a connector create themselves, since it lets them get an instant price and move on to approval in seconds.
💡 Who is this for? This guide is for Account Admins and Project Managers who need to set up Quote Automation and understand how and when a project gets quoted automatically within the wxrks platform.
How Quote Automation works
When Quote Automation is on for a project, wxrks skips the usual manual review step: as soon as the project's files are ingested and its logfile is ready, the platform calculates costs from the project's price list and creates the tasks for each workflow step by itself. The project then moves from Draft straight to Pending, ready for approval.
Every new project already has a price list applied to it, whether or not Quote Automation is on: wxrks uses the price list set up for your Organizational Unit or account if you have one, and otherwise falls back to a default price list ($USD per word) so a cost can always be calculated. Quote Automation doesn't change which price list is used — it changes whether the project quotes itself and moves to Pending automatically, instead of waiting for a Project Manager to review it. For how prices and cost line items actually work, see Project Costs.
This is also separate from the Automatic / Manual toggle on a project's own Costs tab (covered in Project Overview), which only controls whether that one project's cost line items are calculated from the price list or entered by hand. Quote Automation controls something bigger: whether the whole project skips manual review and moves to Pending by itself.
Turning on Quote Automation
Quote Automation is available on wxrks' paid plans — check the current pricing page to confirm what's included for your plan. Three separate settings gate it, and all three have to allow it for a given project to actually auto-quote.
Account level
Go to Settings > Account Settings > Usage tab and toggle Enable Quote Automation.
⚠️ This is the master switch: turning it off instantly turns Quote Automation off for every Organizational Unit in the account too, overriding any Organizational Unit that had it configured individually. Turning it back on resets every Organizational Unit's setting to match again.
Organizational Unit level
Go to Organizations > Organizational Units, open the unit you want to configure, and on its General tab click More settings to reveal the Quote Automation toggle. Every new project created in that Organizational Unit inherits this setting at the moment it's created.
⚠️ Reminder: click Save after changing it.
Workflow level
Each workflow step also has its own Quote Automation switch, on by default. Go to Settings > Translation Settings > Workflows, select a workflow from the list, and turn its Quote Automation switch off if that step needs a human check before a project can be quoted — QA, Interpretation, and Voiceover are common examples. If any file in a project runs through a workflow step with this switch off, the whole project is skipped from automation.
What happens once a project is created
If a project meets every condition above, its status changes from Draft straight to Pending as soon as the automatic quote is ready — no one needs to open it first. While this runs, and afterward, a small robot icon next to the project shows its automation status if you hover over it:
Project automation in progress - the calculation is still running.
Project automation finished - the project was quoted and moved to Pending automatically.
Project automation skipped - the project didn't qualify; see the reasons below.
Project automation failed - the calculation itself hit an error.
For a Project Manager whose clients or connectors create their own projects, this is the main payoff: those projects can get an instant price and move straight to approval in seconds, without waiting on a Project Manager to review and quote them manually.
When a project won't quote itself automatically
Quote Automation only runs when every file and workflow step in the project qualifies for it. If something in the project doesn't, its status shows Project automation skipped instead of moving to Pending — the project's status history spells out exactly which file format or workflow caused it, so that's the fastest way to check on a specific project. The most common reasons:
A file's format isn't eligible for automatic quoting. Most standard Office, HTML, JSON, XML, XLIFF, and subtitle formats are, but InDesign IDML files, PDFs, image and audio/video files, and ZIP archives are not — see Supported and Unsupported File Extensions for what wxrks can translate at all, which is a broader list than what Quote Automation supports.
A workflow step used in the project has its own Quote Automation switch turned off (see above).
For a continuous (recurring) project fed by a connector, Quote Automation currently only runs for content coming from the Salesforce, Drupal, AEM, Eloqua, Marketo, or Contentful connectors — recurring projects from other sources need manual quoting.
If something goes wrong during the calculation itself rather than an eligibility check, the project shows Project automation failed instead. Either way, a Project Manager can still pick up the quote manually: open the project's Costs tab and click Create Costs. See Project Costs for how manual cost entry works.