Offers
This article will show how to send a customer an offer from Moment. The most important settings in the module will also be explained.
This functionality is available only for customers with Moment Essential and above
For a step by step guide about how to use and create offers, please see this video:
The screenshot above shows the offer overview window. This window gives key information regarding the status and progress of different offers. For instance, a green checkmark shows that the project has been accepted by the customer. A grey envelope shows that the offer has status "ready to send". On the right side we can see the total price for all the offers sent together with what else is left to invoice. These amounts are also indicated individually for each offer. Eventual projects that the offer might be part of are also indicated in the overview.
The window also allows for using search terms to find specific offers. As you can see on the top of the picture. The column "filter" shows the different offer states and allows to simply filter out offers with statuses you do not want to see.
To create an offer, click on the button on the top right corner called " new offer". Then, you can choose a customer, a name for the offer and then a tag (if you use tags)
Once you have seleced the values, the following picture will appear:
Moment will automatically fill in certain values corresponding to the customer, issue date and the coworker creating the offer. However other fields should be filled depending on the needs of your customer, such as start-up date, customer reference and contract reference. These fields are not required to make an offer but their importance will vary from customer to customer.
Once you have defined the most relevant values, you can add new activities to the offer. these might include certain services to be billed either per hour or in a fixed price.
In the following example I will create a new activity called "pre-planning phase 1". This activity includes two roles with each their own hour price. To this activity I will add two tasks and an expense. As you will see, it is easy to add the hour prices, the expected costs of an expense and the price that will be billed to the customer.
First we define the hourly rates to be billed. Then we create the activity and add the estimated amount of hours. The program automatically adds the totals. In these state, the offer is ready to be sent to the customer.
An example of how to add an activity, with tasks and expenses, to an offer draft
On the right side of the screen, there is a series of options (these can be hidden by clicking hide). These settings will be explained in detail below:
Set state
Go to customer
Create project based on the offer
Connect offer to an existent project
Customer's offer page
Copy link to customer's offer page
View history
Make copy
Settings
This option is an important part of the workflow in an offer. By changing the state to "ready to send" you are not longer able to directly edit activities in the offer. If you wish to do that you will get a warning:
The warning is self explanatory. It tells that doing any edits in the activities will require to either set the status for the offer to draft, or to edit, but keeping the status. It might be a good idea to set a proper internal routine to keep track of changes made to offers in this state.
Offers with status "draft" will not get the option to create an offer page for the customer. Once the offer has been given the a status as "ready to send". You will be able to manually set the state to either "accepted" or "declined". The customer will be able to set this state themselves once they accept the offer from the customer page.
This option simply takes the user to the customer's main page.
This option creates a new project based on the activities, tasks, prices and participants in the offer. By using this option and copying activites and tasks, a lot of time is saved. As you can see in the picture below, hour prices, estimated hours and total price has been copied over from the offer draft. The rest of the information on the project can be redefined and edited if you so wish.
This functionality allows you to connect an offer to a new project. This will copy the activities and corresponding price models from the offer to the project. Activities and price models will be tagged with the offers name and number
When the offer is finalized, an offer page is created which can be sent to the customer. This page gives an overview of the details from the offer that are relevant for the customer. This page also gives the opportunity to either accept or decline the offer. Depending on the customer's answer, this will alsio change the status of the offer. Below you can see a picture of the customer's offer page:
This functionality copies the link from the customer's offer page. This URL can be resent to the customer if needed.
This option shows a pop-up window that gives an overview of changes made to the offer by any coworkers:
This gives the option to copy an offer so that it can be used as a template for future offers.
This option allows to set up different choices regarding layout and pricing model that will be relevant for the offer.
Price model: This allows to set the type of price model that will be used on the project attached to the offer. This can be set to be either a fixed price, an hourly price model, or a price model based on the offer. The price model based on the offer will allow you to invoice directly from the offer editing window. In that case, it will include all the expenses and offers as they have been specified in the offer editing window.
The rest of the checkmarks and options are self-explanatory but relate mainly to the layout of the customer offer-page or invoice.
You can also set Invoiced in advance. This will update the offer with whatever amount has been invoiced in advance by your company.
Roles can also be defined in this window. These roles will show up on the offer main screen. This will allow you to set up hour-price and the amount of hours delegated to each task. However, if a project is created based on the offer you still have to assigned the respective roles to each co-worker on the project.
If we suppose a customer accepts and offer and you proceeed implementing it, there will be a series of different actions you might want to take.
In the following example I show what you can do if the customer accepts the offer, or in this case, you manually update the offer status to accepted.
Lets assume that part of the first phase has been successfully implemented and you wish to invoice the customer for this. First, you need to set the status of the offer to ready for invoicing. The next step will be to select which parts of the offer you will invoice. In our example, I chose to invoice the first task on the first activity of the project (phase 1).
On the selection screen, just mark the relevant boxes and click save.
Once you have done that, go to the project, then to "to be invoiced". There you will see that the task, along with previously invoiced hours (defined from the offer settings) appear. Make necessary changes to the draft as needed or just finalize it and send it.
This process can be repeated for subsequent phases of the project as needed. Be aware that billable expenses specified from an offer will not create an automatic expense in the project.
Projects in Moment can support several offers for each project. In the project's main page it is now possible to create an offer. You will have the possibility to copy existent activities in the project to the offer and even activities that might exist in other offers in the project: