Within Proposable, your sales documents can be in 3 different *states*. You will notice that in our documentation that we reference “Drafts”, “Proposals” and “Templates” on many occasions. These are different life-cycles that a document can have in our platform and in this document, we plan to help you understand the difference in each state. Here is a quick description of each state a document can have inside of Proposable:

A template is an originating document of which Proposals are created from. Templates live in the Library and can be shared with other team members. For example, a salesperson selects a Template from the Library, it will then be replicated and any changes to the document at this point will not affect the Master Template. The purpose of a template is to maintain consistency and allow you or team members to have a baseline or foundation when creating proposals. Imagine your Templates library as the Word Document that you cherish and would like it to be your “clean” version.

Once the salesperson delivers the proposal to a customer (or Recipient), it becomes a Proposal and lives in the Proposals tab and is now in the “In Progress” status. This means that the proposal is a living, breathing document.

A draft is generated from a Template when you click on either New Delivery > From Template of which allows you to choose a template. This will then generate a draft which completely detaches itself from the Template. At this point, it now becomes a standalone ‘Draft’ and has now become a clone of the original Template but can be customized to your liking. This gives you the ability to make the necessary changes and if for any reason you need to close the browser or save for later, the draft will always live in the Proposals > Drafts section of Proposable. It allows you to come back and make changes whenever you want without losing any information. Drafts also work great for teams who need a workflow or approval process by allowing other team members to see a proposal that is a work in progress.

A proposal consists of a proposal that has been delivered and lives in the Proposals tab. This means that from a template a draft was generated that eventually became a proposal. A proposal is considered an “In Progress” document and is now a live document that is viewable to your client. Each recipient has a private URL and is only visible to the desired recipient can see this proposal as long as you keep it In Progress. You have full control over the view-ability of this proposal by either keeping it “In Progress” or archiving it. A proposal has multiple states:

As an owner of this Proposal, you have control of which state the proposal is in. You can manually Accept, Decline or Archive a proposal by using the Actions drop-down button in the Proposals tab.