ConnectWise CPQ Quote Items

Overview

Line items are the priced rows of a CPQ quote — hardware, licences, labour, recurring services. Each item belongs to exactly one tab (a section of the quote), and each tab belongs to one quote. Items carry both sell and cost figures, so margin is computed per line, per tab and per quote.

Anti-triggers

• Looking up a product, SKU, list price or manufacturer — CPQ has no catalog to search (see below). The priced SKU master list is ConnectWise PSA's; use connectwise-psa-product-catalog and carry the values onto the line yourself.
• Quote-level fields — status, totals, expiry, versions, quote customers, payment terms — those hang off the quote header, not its lines; use connectwise-cpq-quotes.
• Line items on another vendor's quote — Kaseya Quote Manager quote lines and SalesBuildr quote products share this vocabulary exactly; use kaseya-quote-manager-quotes or salesbuildr-quotes.

Key Concepts

Items live on tabs, and tabs are read-only

idQuote says which quote; idQuoteTabs says which section of it. The API has no tab create/update/delete — tabs come from the template a quote was copied from, or are added in the CPQ web app.

cpq_create_quote_item resolves the tab for you: with idQuoteTabs omitted it reads the quote's tabs, uses the only one if there is exactly one, and otherwise asks which to use (erroring with the tab list if it cannot ask). A quote with no tabs cannot take items at all — that has to be fixed in CPQ.

There is no product catalog

CPQ's real-time price sourcing (Etilize, distributor feeds) is not exposed over the REST API. You cannot search products, look up a distributor price, or add "a product" by SKU lookup. Items are created by writing their fields directly, or by copying a quote or template that already contains them. etilizeProductId on an existing line records where a line originally came from; it is not a searchable handle.

Practical consequence: the reliable way to build a priced quote is to copy a template that already carries the right lines and adjust quantities and prices, rather than composing lines from scratch.

Pricing and margin fields

Field	Notes
basePrice	Unit sell price
cost	Unit cost
quantity	Line quantity
extendedPrice	basePrice x quantity, as computed by CPQ
extendedCost	cost x quantity
discount	Line discount
grossMargin	Line margin
costModifier	Markup/margin rule applied to derive price from cost
isProtectedPrice	Price locked against repricing

Line flags and structure

Field	Notes
isOptional	Customer-selectable line; excluded from the base total
isBundleHeader / isBundleComponent	Bundle parent and its children
isPhaseItem	Belongs to a project phase
isPrinted	Appears on the printed proposal
idRecurringRevenue	Links the line to a recurring-revenue period (list them with cpq_list_recurring_revenues)

PSA mapping

cwClass, cwAgreement and crmReference control how a line lands in ConnectWise PSA when a won quote is ported. Porting itself happens in the integration engine, not here, but wrong values on these fields surface as billing problems later.

Identity fields worth setting on a new line: mfgPartNumber (manufacturer part number) and description.

Common Workflows

List the lines on a quote

cpq_search_quote_items with conditions: idQuote = "<quote-guid>", plus an includeFields such as id,description,mfgPartNumber,quantity,basePrice,extendedPrice,cost. Filter to one section with idQuoteTabs = "<tab-guid>" instead. Page until a page returns fewer rows than pageSize; searches cover latest quote versions only unless you pass showAllVersions: true.

Add a line

1. If the quote may have several sections, cpq_search_quote_tabs with conditions: idQuote = "<quote-guid>" to pick the tab.
2. cpq_create_quote_item with idQuote, optionally idQuoteTabs, and an item object:

item = { "mfgPartNumber": "ABC-123",
         "description": "Managed endpoint - per device",
         "quantity": 50, "basePrice": 12.00, "cost": 7.20 }

Reprice or adjust a line

cpq_update_quote_item with the item GUID and either fields (partial object) or patch (raw RFC 6902 ops) — one or the other, not both.

cpq_update_quote_item  id=<item-guid>  fields={ "quantity": 60, "basePrice": 11.50 }

Patch the unit fields (quantity, basePrice, cost) and let CPQ recompute the extended figures; writing extendedPrice directly fights the calculation engine.

Remove a line

cpq_delete_quote_item with the item GUID, and the delete is permanent. An interactive client is prompted first, echoing the line's description or part number; a non-interactive one — the gateway included — is refused until the call is re-invoked with confirm_destructive_action: true. Setting isPrinted: false or isOptional: true is the non-destructive way to take a line off a proposal.

Gotchas

• A missing idQuoteTabs is the most common create failure. Single-tab quotes work without it; multi-tab quotes need one, and it must belong to the same quote.
• Deletes are per line, so bundles need care. cpq_delete_quote_item removes exactly the item you name. Before deleting an isBundleHeader line, list the quote's items and deal with its isBundleComponent children deliberately rather than assuming they follow.
• isOptional lines are excluded from the quote total but still returned by searches, so a line-item sum will not match quoteTotal unless you account for them.
• Item searches span quotes. cpq_search_quote_items with no conditions walks every quote in the tenant; always scope by idQuote or idQuoteTabs.
• QuoteItemView has ~224 properties. Send includeFields or the response is mostly empty custom-field slots.

Related Skills

• ConnectWise CPQ Quotes — quote lifecycle, versions, customers, terms
• ConnectWise CPQ API Patterns — auth, conditions syntax, paging, JSON Patch