Proposals and signing

A draft job has a Proposal view: the same estimate, laid out as a document with your company details, ready to print or send.

What the client sees

You control how much detail leaves the building. Display options let you show or hide line items, quantities, unit prices and fee percentages, so the client can see a full itemized scope or a single number per category.

Out of the box a proposal shows the scope and the price, not your rates. Each line item is listed by its description, each category shows its total, and the contract total sits at the bottom. Quantities, unit prices, per-line amounts and fee percentages stay off the client's copy until you turn them on, because a client holding your rates can shop them line by line.

You can also collapse individual categories. Everything inside a collapsed category rolls up to its total, which is useful when one part of the job is priced in detail and another is a lump sum you would rather not break apart.

Set the defaults once in Settings and they apply to every job. Override them per job when a particular client needs something different. A choice you have saved, for your company or for a job, always wins over the built-in defaults, and a proposal you already sent keeps exactly the detail it was sent with.

How the client pays

Under the estimate on a draft job, How the client pays sets how the job is priced and how the money comes in. It prints on the proposal, so the client agrees to it when they sign.

• Fixed price. You write a payment schedule: a deposit at signing, payments tied to

milestones in your own words ("Rough-in inspected", "Cabinets set"), and a final payment. Type each one as a percent or a dollar amount, and mark one as "the rest" to take whatever the others leave. The proposal always prints dollars.

• Cost-plus. There is no schedule. The proposal says the client is billed for the actual

cost of the work as it's done plus your fee, and its total reads Estimated total. Unless you have set your own proposal defaults, a cost-plus proposal also shows each line's amount and your fee percent, since the open books are the arrangement.

Start from a typical schedule fills in a 10% deposit, three milestone payments and the balance after the final walkthrough, ready to edit before you save. Save as my usual schedule keeps yours for the next job, and new jobs start as fixed price or cost-plus, whichever you pick as your default.

The schedule is frozen into the proposal when you send it, in dollars, like everything else on it. Your company's payment terms text still prints below it if you use one. Once the job is active, the Project Costing tab bills the same schedule one payment at a time; see project costing.

Sending it for signature

Choose Send for signature and enter the client's name and email. They get a link to a page with the proposal and a signature block. No account, no password.

Signing is a typed name, an email that has to match the one you sent to, and a checkbox. The signature is recorded with the time, the signer's name and email, and the network address it came from.

When a proposal is signed, the job promotes itself from draft to active and you get an email. Your client gets one too: their own copy of what they signed, with the total, the date, a link back to the signed proposal and a PDF to keep. It carries your company name, and if they reply, the reply goes to you. Any other outstanding signature requests for that job are revoked automatically, so there is never a second live copy of a proposal in the wild.

Following up

A proposal that's been out a few days without a signature gets a Nudge button on its request on the proposal page. Nudge sends your client a short, friendly note from you with the same link: if they haven't opened it, it checks the proposal reached them; if they have, it asks whether they have any questions. Replies come to you. You can follow up once every 3 days, and the request shows when you last did. Nothing is ever sent on its own.

Links expire

A signature link is good for 30 days. You can revoke one at any time, or resend it if it went to the wrong address. If an email bounces, the request shows it, so a proposal that never arrived does not look the same as one the client is ignoring.

Change orders

Once a job is active, changes to the contract go through the Change Orders tab rather than by editing the estimate. A change order carries its own number, description and amount, and applies its own adjustments to categories when you approve it. That is what keeps the original contract legible next to what the job actually became.

A change order can be sent for the client's signature the same way a proposal is, and their signature approves it. See change orders.