Improving Quotes is the major theme of this release. These are the Quotes for Projects and affect TidyWork, TidyBuild and TidyEnterprise.
The biggest changes are to the Edit and Create screen and are focused on improving the way you're able to build up a price for your quote. We've also worked to improve the way you manage a quote, making it easier for your team to work together on filling in the details and managing the sales process. And we've given you a new set of quote templates so you can easily send a quote to your customers with the right level of detail.
You can now add Peer Estimators to Quotes. This works in the same way as adding a Peer Project Manager to a project. The Peer Estimator has full access to edit the quote. You can choose to give Estimators Peer access to all new Quotes (from the User Edit screen).
The Quote Edit screen has a new Price section, so you can see the price change as you edit the quote. It shows you the break down by the major categories: Time, Materials and Expenses. You'll also see costs, profits, and margin or markup. If the price type is Fixed Price, you'll be able to set the price by margin or markup.
When you set the price type as Fixed Price, the price field will now display in the new Price section. If you don't enter a price, the price calculated by totalling the components will be used (as if the price type was Time and Material).
The Quote Edit > Material Plan now allows you to set the charge price for materials by either margin or markup. The margin or markup is displayed, and if you choose to edit it, this will adjust the charge price. You can also set the margin or markup of all materials at once.
A new global setting allows you to set whether your company uses margin or markup.
We've redesigned how the Quotes Edit > Material Plan works for users with the Materials Under Tasks feature (this allows you to assign Materials to Tasks). The Materials list is now organised by Task, with Materials being added directly to a task. This makes it easier to use and to see the organisation.
You can now label a quote as either a Quote or an Estimate. This is set on the Invoicing tab.
The layout of the form fields at the top of the Quote Edit screen has been improved to show the most important information at the top and give a better visual layout.
As a little time saver, the default contact for a company will automatically be selected when you choose the company a Quote is being created for. You can change or remove the contact if necessary.
Start and End Dates are now optional for Quotes, so you can ignore them if you don't need them.
In the Quote Edit > Time Plan, nonbillable tasks are now indicated in blue, as is the case in Projects.
Milestones on a fixed price quote, now display a total of all milestone invoice amounts. The difference between the milestone total, and the total price of the quote is also shown. There is a Use button which adds a new milestone with the difference as the invoice amount.
Tweaks to improve the handling of the Clone Quote process have been made.
When entering a quote or project Code on the Edit screen, the input is immediately converted into a valid code.
We've replaced the default template for the document that is generated from a Quote with three new options. These vary in the level of detail from Basic, to Summary and Detailed. This will help you to quickly generate quote documents that meet most of your needs. If you need the fine tuning of a Custom Document Template, then these are still available. Documents can be downloaded in PDF or Microsoft Word format.
You can now email quote documents directly from Tidy when you create them.
The Quote Console now has a new Opportunity section with two fields for managing the sales process of a quote. The Opportunity Likelihood field allows you to enter and adjust the likelihood percentage of winning the quote. You can enter a value between 0 and 100. The Opportunity Stage field allows you to enter a word describing the current stage the quote is at. The Opportunity Stage will give you autocomplete suggestions, so you can see the stages you've used before. These fields can both be updated from the Quote Console screen, by using the Edit button in the Opportunity section.
On the Quote Console the Expiry/Accepted Date displays much more quickly.
In Projects and Quotes, if a task was made nonbillable, and the project or quote was saved and then reopened, the task would incorrectly show a charge and would be included in the Total Estimated Charge that was displayed. This did not affect the value displayed anywhere else, but has now been fixed.
In Project and Quote Edit the header of the Material Plan was missing in some situations. This is fixed.
In Project and Quote Edit, on the Material Plan, when you added a brand new Material Item (from the Add Material Item dialog) the cost, charge, currencies and stock level were not automatically included in the plan. A similar issue was present when adding a task on a subcontract. These have been improved so all prices and currencies are now included on the plan.
We've improved the handling of a situation where a quote has been accepted (and has a status of Won) and the resulting project is then deleted. You can now open the quote in the Quote Console and Re-Accept it, to re-create a project from the quote.
We've fixed a situation where a new quote failed validation because of invalid input, but still created a new quote.