Proposals Overview

Create beautiful, professional proposals that allow customers to review their options, accept a quote and continue through your booking journey.

Using a proposal you can present your services, packages and optional products in a branded online page. Your customer can review their choices, accept their preferred quote and then continue to the next step you have configured, such as signing a contract, making a payment, opening their Client Portal or redirecting them to an External URL.

A proposal is a single page built for one client, covering one job, that you send them a link to. It shows the quote you've prepared alongside whatever text, images and styling you've added. The closest description is a small website that exists for that client and nobody else.

Leads, bookings and where proposals fit

A job is either unconfirmed or confirmed. An unconfirmed job is a lead. A confirmed job is a booking. The proposal is the tool that moves a job from one to the other.

So the order is always the same. Create the lead first, build a proposal against it, send it, and when the client accepts, the lead becomes a booking.

That is worth knowing before you go looking for a proposals section on its own. Proposals hang off leads rather than living separately, and a proposal only ever covers the job it was created from.

What the client sees

The client opens the link and gets your page. Not a bare quote in an email body, and not a PDF attachment they have to download. The page uses whatever you built into the template, so the quote sits inside your own layout, copy and imagery rather than a generic wrapper.

Everything on it relates to their job. There is nothing to log into and nothing to hunt through.

Options

A proposal can hold more than one quote. If you want to present option A, option B and option C, they sit as tabs on the page and the client moves between them.

They have to choose one. Accepting is a decision between the options you have given them rather than a shopping basket they can combine, so build each option as a complete package at a complete price.

This is the main reason to send a proposal rather than a single figure. A client comparing your three options against each other is a much better conversation than a client comparing your one figure against somebody else's.

What happens when they accept

The lead converts to a booking. After that it depends on the settings you have chosen in the proposal itself.

You can take them straight into the contract, then payment, then the client portal, so accepting and getting signed and paid all happen in one run while they are still sat there deciding. Or you can stop the flow earlier and handle the rest yourself.

Most people run the full chain. The moment a client says yes is the moment they are most willing to sign and pay, and asking them to wait for a follow up email tends to cost you both.

Creating one

Start from the leads view. There is a create proposal button on the row.

If you cannot see it, it has not been added to your layout rather than being missing. Open edit row layout and add it.

Clicking it asks you to choose a theme. Themes are prebuilt templates you can use as they are, and you can build your own to match how you present work.

Once you have picked one, edit it for that customer, publish it, then send it.

Variables

Templates use variables, which are placeholders that pull in the details of whichever lead the proposal is attached to.

Build the template once with variables where the client name, dates, venue and quote figures should go, and every proposal created from it fills itself in. You are not rewriting the same page for each enquiry, and you are not copying and pasting details between records where they can go wrong.

The practical effect is that a proposal can go out in under a minute. Pick the theme, check the page, publish, send. Anything specific to that client gets edited on top of the variables rather than typed from scratch.

If you only build one template, build it well. It will do most of the work from then on.

When to use one

Send a proposal when you are selling rather than confirming. New enquiries, competitive jobs, anything where the client is weighing you against somebody else, and anything where you want to show options rather than a single price.

Where a client already knows exactly what they want and has effectively bought, a proposal is presentation you may not need. The judgement is whether the client still has a decision to make. If they do, give them something to make it with.