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Send, track, and revise a proposal

Once a proposal is built, this is the loop you live in: get it in front of your customer, watch what they do with it, and change it if the job moves on. Building the proposal itself is a separate job, covered by the pages on how proposals work and building one.

Before you start​

  • The proposal needs to exist. Find it under Sales Pipeline → Proposals.
  • Set a Recipient if the proposal does not have one. You can publish without it, but you cannot email your customer from inside Simplified.

Find a proposal​

Unlike quotes, proposals live in one list regardless of product. Search matches the proposal reference, its title, and your customer's name, email address, phone number, or address.

Filter with Status Filters and Label Filters, and reorder with Sort by, which offers Created, Updated, Accepted, and Published newest-first, plus Last Name (A to Z) and First Name (A to Z).

What the statuses mean​

Like quote tags, these stack. A live proposal your customer has not answered yet shows both Published and Pending Acceptance.

StatusWhat it means
DraftNot published. Only your team can see it.
PublishedLive at its web address. Anyone with the link can open it.
Pending AcceptancePublished, and your customer has not accepted yet.
AcceptedYour customer has been through acceptance and committed.
ExpiredThe Proposal valid until date has passed without acceptance.

A proposal expires at the end of the day shown in Proposal valid until, so a proposal valid until today is still open all day today. An accepted proposal never shows as expired.

Publish and share it​

Sending happens in two steps, and the first one does not involve your customer at all.

  1. Open the proposal and click Publish. This makes it live at its web address. It does not email your customer.
  2. Click Share. This stays greyed out until you publish, with the reason Proposal must be published to share.
  3. Either click Copy URL and send the link yourself, or send it from here using one of the three templates.
  4. Pick a template, adjust the wording in Compose email, and click Send.

The three templates cover the follow-up cycle:

TemplateWhen to use it
General proposal templateFirst send. A call to action to view the proposal.
Expiry warning templateA reminder that the proposal is about to run out.
Savings reminder templateA nudge based on what they stand to save.

All three need a recipient. Without one you see Set a recipient first to send proposal emails.

If Publish is greyed out​

The badges next to the status tell you what is wrong. Only Multiple acceptance blocks actually blocks publishing — a proposal cannot have two accept buttons. Pricing block missing, Acceptance block missing, and Recipient not set are warnings. They are worth reading before you publish, but they will not stop you.

Track what your customer does​

Click the Last updated timestamp to open the Activity log. It records the whole history of the proposal, including when someone opened the proposal, fully viewed the proposal by scrolling to the end, signed the proposal, and accepted the proposal, alongside your own team's actions like published the proposal and sent email to customer.

Your team also gets emails as this happens — when your customer first opens the proposal, when they reach the end of it, and when they accept.

Use Followers to add colleagues to those notifications. It takes email addresses, and it is internal only: the panel warns explicitly against putting customer addresses in there.

On the list itself, the Published column shows the date each proposal went live.

Revise a proposal you have already sent​

A published proposal is locked for editing — the editor only offers Preview and PDF. To change one:

  1. Click Unpublish and confirm. Edit and Reordering come back.
  2. Make your changes.
  3. Click Publish again.

The web address never changes, so any link you have already sent still works afterwards. While the proposal is unpublished, anyone opening that link sees This proposal is not published, so do the work promptly if your customer is mid-decision.

Proposal valid until can only be changed while the proposal is unpublished. If you need to extend a deadline, unpublish, change the date, and publish again.

caution

Once a proposal is Accepted it is locked for good. You cannot unpublish it and you cannot edit it. If the job changes after acceptance, clone it and work on the copy.

Other actions on the list​

  • Clone creates a copy titled with (Copy), back in Draft, with the recipient, publish state, and all tracking cleared. This is how you produce a variant without disturbing what your customer already has.
  • Rename changes the Title, which is what your team sees in the list.
  • Delete removes selected proposals. The confirmation warns it cannot be undone.
  • Labels work exactly as they do on quotes: select rows, apply a set of labels, and filter on them later.

Check it worked​

  1. After publishing, open the web address in a private browser window and confirm your customer would see the finished proposal.
  2. Check the status badges read Published and Pending Acceptance.
  3. After emailing, open the Activity log and confirm sent email to customer is recorded.