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Creating A New Proposal (Classic Proposals)
Ella Buan avatar
Written by Ella Buan
Updated over a week ago

Proposals are the heart and soul of Ignition. It is used to initiate engagements with your clients, present what services you're offering, and have them accept the engagement online.

Creating a proposal

You can create proposals easily from the Quick Add button at the top of the page.

Or navigate to the Proposals tab and click New Proposal.

General

Let's start creating your first proposal!

Add a proposal name

Nominate a name that will help identify the proposal in the future. This is useful when you have multiple proposals for a client.

Select the client for this proposal

You can import your leads/clients into Ignition via CSV, or connecting to a Practice Management system or your accounting app, so they will show up in this list automatically.

Choose a Contact

You can have multiple contacts for each client. The default contact is automatically chosen for you as seen above.

Choose the Start and End Date

This should represent the period of time when the work is being carried out. We recommend setting a 12-month engagement period. 

The blue buttons can be used as a short-cut, but you can enter dates manually too.

NOTE: An end date is mandatory.

Decide on your recurring billing settings

  1. Your first decision to make is what should happen to recurring services when your proposal reaches it's end date.

    If you choose continue recurring billing, your recurring services will continue to generate an invoice and/or collect payments until you choose to complete the proposal or adjust your proposal. Your proposal status will remain active when continuous recurring billing is enabled.

    Choose this option if you prefer your client contracts to be open ended.

    If you choose stop recurring billing,  your recurring services will no longer generate an invoice and/or collect payments once the end date hits. Provided there is no outstanding billing, your proposal will then be marked as complete.

    Choose this option if you prefer to renew your client contracts periodically (i.e. every year). You will need to create a brand new proposal to renew your proposal.

  2. Next, select how frequently you want to bill your recurring services. You can choose between Monthly and Weekly.

    If you select the Monthly option, the Recurring Invoice Day controls which day of the month your client will be billed for those services.

    The day of the month that's selected when you create a new proposal comes from the Default Recurring Invoice Day in your General Settings.

If you're not planning on including recurring services, you can ignore this.

Services

Going to the Services tab, set up your jobs and choose services to include in each job. 

If you have integrated your Ignition account with a Practice Management app, the jobs you create here are what will be pushed across to your Practice Manager as a job. Otherwise, you can leave Job name blank. Read more information on how to set up jobs here.

Add a Service in the proposal. You can start typing a keyword  to narrow down your service list.

Review and edit the Service Description as necessary. The service description can be changed for every proposal. The default description for each service can be set in Library → Services.

Click here to read more about service description best practices.

Select the appropriate billing type for this service. Ignition is perfect for one-off project work or monthly recurring billing, with a variety of billing options. You can change the service's billing type here. Recurring will work best with this tutorial.

Customize the price of your service based on the changes you made to the Service Description. You can also edit the Tax Rate (if applicable) and the item quantity below.

Once Done, click Save Service at the bottom of the Service. You can add more services to the proposal by clicking Add Service.

Terms

After you have entered all the jobs and services for the proposal, click on the Terms tab to choose which engagement letter you wish to use for this proposal.
Learn how to create different engagement letter templates here.

Here, you can also choose whether or not to display the total value of the proposal on the client acceptance page. 

If you want to refer to a particular financial or reporting period in your engagement letter, choose a contract fiscal period end date for your proposal. Click here to read more in our Help Center.

Presentation

Next, go to the Presentation tab.

Choose the user you'd like the Proposal to come from, or leave as is to use Company default sender.

Optional: Copy anyone into the Proposal email by typing in their email address(es) here

Attach a Brochure to display additional marketing or supportive content to your client on the proposal.

Add an introduction or next steps video that will be shown to the client when the proposal is opened and another video once the proposal is accepted.

Add an optional personal message if you would like to point out something specific to the client, or just say thanks. This message will appear in the first page of the proposal along with the proposal video and brochure. Go ahead and give it a try!

You have the option of enabling or disabling Show Service Prices which will make the proposal display a line by line pricing breakdown of your services.

Payments

Next is the Payment tab.

Here's where you can enable the ability to collect payment details at the time of acceptance and process payments through Ignition.

If you haven't activated your trial, you won't see this tab yet. You can learn more about Ignition's Payment feature here.

Apps

Last is the Apps tab. You will only see this if you have Xero Practice Manager connected with Ignition.

This allows you to turn off the job functions for this proposal. You would only do this if you already had jobs created for this client and don't need a new job to be deployed from Ignition. Typically if you have not created a job for this client yet, we recommend leaving it enabled.

Finalizing the Proposal

Once done, go ahead and click Create Proposal.

Notice that your proposal status is "Draft". This status will update automatically as it's Awaiting Acceptance, Active or Completed.

You can use the View Client Accept Page to double check your Proposal. This will open a new tab with a preview of what your client will actually see when they click on the View Proposal link in the email you are about to send.

After reviewing the letter, you can close that tab. You are now ready to send your proposal to your client.

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