Proposal Builder Settings

Alongside the page itself, the Proposal Builder has a set of menus controlling how the proposal behaves, how it is styled globally, and what happens to it once more than one person is working on it.

Configure proposal

Open the configure proposal menu to set the page title and the expiry date.

The page title is what appears at the top of the browser when the customer opens the link.

The expiry date is the date the offer stops being available. Setting one is worth doing on most proposals, because an open ended quote gives a customer no reason to decide this week rather than next month. It also protects you when costs change between quoting and hearing back.

Activity

The activity view shows what has happened to the proposal.

You can see which members of your team have worked on it, whether the customer has opened it, and the date they accepted.

Knowing whether a proposal has been seen changes how you follow up. A customer who has not opened it needs a different message from one who read it twice and went quiet, and guessing between those two is how good chases turn into annoying ones.

Global styling

The global styling menu controls the look of the whole proposal rather than any single element.

Layout

Choose between a full width layout and a boxed one, and set the container width.

Full width suits image heavy designs. Boxed keeps the content within a defined column, which usually reads better when there is a lot of text on the page.

Background

Set a background colour or a background image for the proposal.

With an image you also control the size, whether it repeats, and its position. You can fix it in place so it stays put as the customer scrolls, which produces a parallax effect.

Keep it subtle. A background exists to sit behind your content rather than to compete with it, and anything busy makes the quote harder to read.

Colour palette

Set a primary colour and up to five secondary colours. These then appear in every colour picker across the proposal.

Use the palette rather than picking colours element by element, because that decision is what makes the design changeable later. Build a whole proposal from palette colours and changing the scheme means going back to the palette and changing the primary colour once. Every element using it updates.

Build the same proposal by choosing colours individually and changing the scheme means clicking through every element on the page and hoping you found them all.

This is the single most useful habit to get into when you are building a template you intend to keep.

Text and fonts

The text menu sets the default font for each text style, so paragraphs, headings and the rest can be set once rather than element by element.

You can also add fonts. Clicking add fonts gives you the full Google font library to choose from and enable inside the proposal, or you can upload your own font files if your brand uses something specific.

Set your fonts before you build rather than after. Changing a font late tends to change how much space text takes up, which can pull a layout apart that you had already got looking right.

Custom code

The custom code menu lets you add code to the header or the body of the proposal.

This covers anything the standard settings do not, such as tracking scripts or styling beyond what the interface exposes.

Treat it as a last resort rather than a first one. Code added here is not visible to whoever edits the proposal next, so it is the hardest part of a design to hand over or debug.

Version control

Every edit is kept, so you can revert to a previous version of the proposal.

This matters most when more than one person works on the same proposal or template. Somebody restructuring a section while a colleague rewords another one is normal, and version history means nobody's work disappears because of it.

If you are about to make a big change to a template that already works, make it knowing you can go back. That tends to produce better templates than being careful.

Preview

Use the preview button to see the proposal as the customer will see it before it goes anywhere.

Check it on a phone as well as a desktop. Most customers will open it on a phone, and stacked columns do not always land in the order you expected.

Sending

Use the send button to send the proposal to the customer.

You can only send a proposal once it has been published. If the send button is not doing anything, publishing is usually the step that has been missed.