Decades of quote-to-cash work (configure-price-quote, contracts, subscriptions and revenue management) at the world's most complex hardware companies taught me one thing: the quote is a promise the factory, the contract and the books all have to keep. Nteli is the quote-to-cash and revenue orchestration company I built so mid-market manufacturers get that same discipline, without a Cisco-sized program or budget.
Cisco, Dell and IBM sell some of the most configurable products on earth. Every order is a combination of thousands of options, and every combination has to be buildable, priced correctly, contractually sound and recognizable as revenue. As an architect, I spent decades designing the configurators and quote-to-cash systems that make that work.
The product configurator for configure-to-order networking: chassis, line cards, optics, licenses and services, with deep option dependencies, sold direct and through partners worldwide.
Rack servers and blade systems: processors, memory, drives, controllers, networking and power, configured by customers and sellers and built to order at enormous volume.
Rack systems: servers, storage, switches, PDUs and cabling assembled into a rack, where space, power, weight and cooling all have to work together.
Quote-to-cash is my expertise: configure-price-quote, contract management, subscription management and revenue management. They're the four points where revenue leaks, and the four questions the Leak Ledger Method asks of every dollar.
Product rules, price books and discount discipline. The leak: configurations that can't be built, discounts off policy, prices from a stale book.
Contracts, sales agreements and amendments. The leak: orders that drift from the quote, price commitments nobody enforces.
Billing, renewals, uplifts, claims and ASC 606. The leak: missed uplifts and renewals, invoices that don't match terms, claims paid without checking.
Tax, government pricing and the audit trail. The leak: filings that don't agree with the deals behind them.
At Cisco, Dell and IBM, the whole machine existed to keep these four answers in agreement. Nteli finds where they drift apart for everyone else, and closes the gap lever by lever.
These came from watching quote-to-cash succeed and fail at enterprise scale. Every Nteli engagement, and every line of the engine, is built on them.
A configurator is only as good as its rules: what goes with what, what's required, what's forbidden, what it costs. Get them right and any interface works. Get them wrong and no interface saves you.
The factory has to build it, the contract has to honor it, finance has to recognize it and the auditor has to accept it. A quote that can't be built or booked isn't fast. It's a future write-off.
Quote to order, order to invoice, invoice to the ledger, ledger to the filing. Every handoff is a place where money quietly disappears. Put each leak on a ledger in dollars, then close it lever by lever.
Sellers and engineers trust a price or a refusal when they can see why: the rule, the code section, the catalog page. Black-box answers get overridden, and overrides are where the leaks start.
Pricing and product rules are a company's crown jewels. They should run in the customer's environment, under the customer's control, governed and audited. Not locked in a vendor's admin screens.
Enterprise programs taught me how much a long, unproven rollout costs. Nteli works in fixed-fee phases: the first one runs alongside your current process, so you see the result before you commit.
Cisco, Dell and IBM can afford eight-figure CPQ programs and teams of rule authors. A $20M–$500M manufacturer building control panels, pump skids, cable assemblies or data center pods runs the same complexity on spreadsheets, tribal knowledge and one senior estimator nobody can afford to lose.
| Enterprise CPQ program | Typical mid-market today | Nteli | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who writes the rules | Dedicated rule-authoring team | In one estimator's head | Starter rule packs per vertical, cited to codes and catalogs; your team overrides with its own, governed and audited |
| How a quote starts | Seller clicks through a configurator | RFQ email re-keyed into Excel | Paste the RFQ, spec or email into Claude or the web app; the engine builds the priced quote |
| Who decides the price | The rules engine | Whoever touched the spreadsheet last | The engine, from your rules and price book. The AI runs the conversation; it never invents a number |
| Quote to order to cash | Integrated across CRM, ERP and billing | Re-typed at every step | Orchestrated across Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics and Epicor: the stack you already run |
| Cost and time to value | Large programs, long rollouts | Not an option | Self-serve engine; fixed-fee practice engagements with a short first phase |
I founded Nteli in 2019 in Austin, Texas; today we work out of Capital Factory. It has two halves that feed each other: a practice that orchestrates quote-to-cash on the systems clients already own, and an engine that turns enterprise configurator know-how into a product anyone can use.
Salesforce Premier Partner and Avalara Certified Partner. 100+ projects, 50+ certified architects, developers and consultants, 4.9★ across 10 verified AppExchange reviews.
Everything I learned building enterprise configurators, as a deterministic constraint engine delivered over MCP. Agents talk. The engine decides.
The four questions never change. How the money moves does, so the Leak Ledger Method follows three motions, and each industry gets its own levers.
Configure-to-order products sold direct. The leak starts in the quote and follows the order into the books.
Price lives in contracts and design registrations; the leak flows out through Ship & Debit claims and chargebacks.
Termed contracts that keep transacting; the leak hides in renewals, uplifts and ratable revenue.
Estimate your leak ledger → · The Leak Ledger Workshop: one day, your data, a dollar ledger per lever →
Nteli has delivered for public companies, PE-backed firms and fast-growing software businesses. A few of them:
US specialty and generic pharma (NASDAQ: ELTP) running Salesforce CRM, Manufacturing Cloud and SAP Business One. Nteli orchestrated quote-to-cash across the stack: contracts, sales agreements, orders, invoicing and cash, in one operational flow.
The payoff: a clean data foundation that makes forecasting chargeback accruals, gross-to-net and demand tractable. Fixed fee, and Elite owns the logic, running in its own environment.
A fund administrator serving 600+ client firms with $131B+ under administration. Nteli gave Aduro one mastered view across 680 isolated Salesforce orgs with Data Cloud and MuleSoft, without loosening the isolation its clients pay for.
Bank feeds from Kyriba to Xero, plus onboarding and offboarding, became routine operations instead of per-client projects.
"Nteli did exactly what they said they would do. It was on time and on budget."
"We had some complex volume discounting that the team was able to overcome to not only make work but make scaleable."
"The value of the results far exceeded what we were charged for the work."
The same discipline I used on networking gear and servers, applied to the engineered-to-order products mid-market manufacturers build every day.
Configurator Architect, IBM rack systems.
Configurator Architect, Dell rack servers and blade systems.
Configurator Architect, Cisco product configurator.
A Salesforce practice built around revenue: CPQ, Revenue Cloud and CRM-to-ERP integration, so the number sales closes matches the number finance recognizes.
Quote-to-cash and channel revenue across manufacturing, pharma, SaaS, finance and nonprofits. 4.9★ on the AppExchange.
Nteli works out of Capital Factory, at the center of Austin's startup community.
The practice discipline, packaged as products: AI agents run the conversation, deterministic engines decide. The first is the Agent Pricing Engine — live across its product lines, connected to Claude over MCP, listed in the official MCP Registry. There will be others.
Send me an RFQ you quoted recently, with names removed. I'll send back what the engine produces, and we'll compare it with yours. No deck, no pitch.