Proposal Templates
Purpose: This article explains how to standardise the proposals your team sends. PMSuite does not ship a saved "proposal template" library the way it does for projects or invoices, but the proposal form is built from reusable pieces — your Products catalogue, the rich-text Description editor, the Calculate Tax toggle, the signature requirement and your Proposal numbering prefix. Setting those up once gives you a consistent, repeatable proposal without starting from a blank page each time.
Who can use it
Company Admin. Building the reusable pieces also requires access to Products (reached through the Orders module) and to Finance Settings (for prefix settings).
Prerequisites
- Familiarity with creating a proposal, so you know which fields a standard setup has to cover.
- A Lead Contact (and, where relevant, a Deal) to attach the proposal to.
- Your standard services entered as Products if you want repeatable line items.
How to Access
Go to Sales → Proposal (/account/proposals) to create and manage proposals.
Supporting screens:
- Products — the reusable line items you select on a proposal. Products sit under the Sales area and are reached through the Orders module (
/account/orders). - Settings → Finance Settings → Prefix Settings — the
Proposal#001numbering prefix.
What a proposal is made of
Standardising starts with knowing the fields you are standardising.
Header fields
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Lead Contact | The recipient the proposal is addressed to. |
| Deal | The deal the proposal belongs to. |
| Valid Till | Expiry date for the offer. |
| Currency | Set per proposal. |
| Calculate Tax | Toggle: calculate tax before or after discount. |
| Description | Rich text editor — your narrative section. |
Line items: Product, Description, Quantity, Unit Price, Tax, Amount.
Auto-calculated: Discount, Tax, Sub Total.
Signature: the Require customer signature for approval toggle. When enabled, the proposal is not treated as accepted until the client digitally signs it. See Proposal Signatures.
Step 1: Build your reusable line items
In the Products list (opened through the Orders module), create one product per service or deliverable you quote regularly. Each product carries a Name, Price, Category and Sub Category, Tax, HSN/SAC, Unit Type and Description.
When you add a line item to a proposal you select that product, and its description, price and tax come with it — so the pricing your team quotes stays consistent no matter who writes the proposal. Quantity and unit price remain editable on the individual proposal.
If a product should never be self-purchased by clients, turn off its Client can purchase toggle. See Adding Products.
Step 2: Settle your standard narrative
The proposal Description field is a rich text editor. Agree internally on the sections your proposals always contain — for example an overview, your approach, deliverables and a timeline — and keep that agreed wording somewhere your team can copy from, such as an article in Workspace → Knowledge Base (/account/knowledgebase). Writers then paste it into the Description and edit the client-specific parts.
Marking the spots that must be customised (for example [Client name]) makes it obvious what still needs editing before sending.
Step 3: Set the tax and signature defaults you expect
Both of these are per-proposal choices, so document the house rule and apply it every time:
- Calculate Tax — decide once whether your business quotes tax before or after discount, and use the same setting on every proposal so totals are comparable.
- Require customer signature for approval — turn this on if a proposal must be signed to count as accepted. Without it, there is no formal signature step.
Step 4: Standardise proposal numbering
In Settings → Finance Settings → Prefix Settings, the proposal prefix defaults to Proposal#001 and can be customised independently of invoices, credit notes, estimates, estimate requests and orders. Setting a prefix that matches your internal referencing keeps proposals easy to find and quote in conversations.
Effect on other features
- Proposal emails reach Lead recipients, so a standardised proposal is delivered to the lead contact on the record.
- Products are shared with estimates, orders and invoices — changing a product's price affects every future document that uses it, not the ones already issued.
- Estimates use the same line-item structure (Product, Description, Quantity, Unit Price, Tax, Amount), so the same product catalogue standardises both. See Creating Estimates.
Limitations
- No saved proposal template library. Unlike projects (which can be started from a Project Template), estimates (which have saved Estimate Templates) and invoices (which offer five built-in layouts), proposals have no stored template you can pick from a dropdown. Workaround: keep your standard narrative in a Knowledge Base article and your standard pricing in the Products catalogue — together they reproduce most of what a template would give you, in a couple of extra clicks.
- Description text is not auto-filled. Every proposal starts with an empty Description. Workaround: paste from your agreed source text as the first step of writing any proposal.
- Tax and signature settings are per proposal, not global defaults. Workaround: record the house rule in the same Knowledge Base article and check both toggles before saving.
- Products carry a single price. Tiered pricing is not a property of one product. Workaround: create a separate product per tier with clearly distinct names, or adjust Unit Price on the proposal line.
Troubleshooting
A line item shows the wrong price. The product's stored price was changed after the proposal was written, or the Unit Price was edited on the line. Check the product in the Products list (via the Orders module), then correct the line on the proposal.
Totals differ between two proposals for the same work. Check the Calculate Tax toggle on each — tax before discount and tax after discount produce different totals from identical line items.
The client says they accepted but the proposal is not marked accepted. If Require customer signature for approval is enabled, the proposal is not accepted until they digitally sign. Confirm whether the signature was completed.
A product is missing from the line-item dropdown. Confirm it exists in the Products list (via the Orders module) and that you are looking at the proposal's product selector rather than a category filter.
Proposal numbering is not what you expect. Check Settings → Finance Settings → Prefix Settings; the proposal prefix is set separately from invoice and estimate prefixes.