The preparation of well-structured, legally compliant offers with correct content makes a good impression on your customers right from the start of a business relationship. It is therefore important to us to provide you with the best possible support in creating, managing and sending offers and orders. In addition to the many existing functions for creating offers and orders, we have added three more features that we would like to introduce in this blog article.
Customer-specific Price Lists for Offers and Orders
As a service provider, especially for large companies, framework agreements are often concluded that include individual hourly and daily rates for the services to be provided. It is therefore important that all offers and orders to be prepared always contain the prices currently agreed for the customer. We have provided a price list management for this purpose.
A price list always refers to one customer and several price lists can be created for a customer. Price lists can be deactivated and a price list can be set as the default. A price list contains a list of the service types for which a different hourly or daily rate has been defined for a customer.
All service types that have been globally defined under "Billing / Service Types" serve as the basis. If you add a service type to a price list, the name and all price settings (hourly rate, daily rate with base value, lower and upper limit) can be overwritten if necessary.
The standard price list, if available, is automatically assigned to an offer and an order when it is created. However, a different price list can also be selected. As soon as offer and order positions with a service item are created, the conditions from the price list are automatically applied. This ensures that you do not accidentally create an offer with the wrong price conditions.
Offer and Order Documents
When preparing offers or orders, the aim is usually not only to list the scope and type of individual services, but also to define all the framework conditions for cooperation, such as travel expense agreements, rights and obligations and warranties. This is usually done through the general terms and conditions, which should form the basis of every offer or order. Therefore, it might be important to include the general terms and conditions with every offer sent to a customer.
For this reason, a new "Documents" tab has been added to the details dialog of an offer and an order.
Any number of PDF documents can be uploaded to an offer or order via this dialog. These documents can be automatically added as attachments when an offer or order is sent, provided they have not been marked as "Internal". Using the standard settings for offers or orders, which can be accessed via the "System Administration / Settings" navigation item, various methods can be defined (as with invoices) as to whether and how documents should be sent via e-mail.
Method for sending offer/order documents: This option determines how the offer/order documents are provided for e-mail dispatch. A distinction is made between the following options:
- Do not attach any documents: Public documents are not taken into account when sending an offer/order via e-mail.
- Attach each document: Each public document is attached to the e-mail.
- Attach as combined document: All public documents are combined into one PDF document and attached to the e-mail. The file name of this attachment can be defined individually.
- Attach in base document: All public documents are combined with the invoice to form one PDF document, which is attached to the e-mail.
File name of the offer/order attachment: An input field can be used to define the file name that is used for the above-mentioned option "Attach as combined document". Placeholders, e.g. the offer/order number, can be used.
In this way, important documents that are an integral part of an offer/order can be automatically included when sending.
Links to Offers and Orders
Each offer and each order usually has relationships to other offers, orders or even invoices and budgets. To give the user a quick overview of these relationships, a new "Links" tab has been added to the details page of an offer and order.
Offers can have links to other offers (copied from/to) or to orders (basis for).
Orders can have links to other orders, offers, invoices and budgets:
Further links between offers and orders can also be created manually. With each link, it is also possible to jump directly to the referenced object. This provides a quick way to find the associated offers, orders, invoices and budgets for an order, for example.
Conclusion
The new features complete the already extensive range of options for creating and managing offers and orders professionally and efficiently in foreknown. The price lists, attached documents and default settings also ensure that offers and orders can be created and delivered in line with customer requirements.This saves key account managers working time while improving the quality of offers and orders.