Proposal ReportsProposal Reports

The Proposal Reports tab houses three primary sections.

Client Reports

These are the documents you will send to your customer to show them what goods and services they will be purchasing from you.

  • Client Proposal – customize the entire proposal and define what pages are included in the document sent to your customer
  • Cover Page – adjust the first page, so it makes you look pretty!
  • Scope – this page provides the plain English description of the work to be completed.
  • Picture Book – a picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. Use this report to print pretty pictures for your customers
  • Group Summary – this report provides a breakdown of the Groups of equipment you’ve defined

Management Reports

Here is where you can perform analysis using several job costing reports.

  • Labor Hours – shows how many hours have been included to install the job
  • Profit & Loss – lets you know how much profit is in the job for parts, labor, and the overall job
  • Product List – the report shows all the products included in the proposal
  • Profit By Product – a report that shows the profit on product lines
  • Retail By Product – a quick breakdown showing the retail price of the parts
  • Profit Analysis – take a deeper dive at where the profit is in a job

Contract

In this section, you’ll customize what contract details apply to this proposal and the subsequent sales order.

  • Select Override Template – define which Custom Template you use. Remember that custom templates can have unique graphics and layouts defined by your system administrator. [ defined in Settings > Custom Templates ]
    • If the template has a predefined payment schedule or contract, you may be prompted to override the current contract and schedule. Feel free to click Yes to apply the templates settings or No to keep the contract and payment schedule as previously defined here on the proposal.
  • Select Override Payment Schedule – your company may have multiple predefined payment terms. Choose a schedule from the dropdown list to update the payment description defined at the bottom of this section. [ defined in Settings > Module Settings > Proposals > Payment Schedules ]
  • Select Override Contract Language – if your system administrator has entered multiple contracts, you can choose the appropriate one here. You may have a separate contract for commercial and residential jobs. Or maybe you provide service in multiple states. Choose the appropriate contract to include the appropriate legal language for work done in each state. [ defined in Settings > Module Settings > Proposals > Contract ]

Updated Custom Template Details

iPoint does not overwrite existing contract language, payment schedules, or labor rates without express approval. That means that when someone changes the Custom Template in Settings, those changes will NOT be automatically applied to existing proposals. We do this because you don’t want to change a proposal in the system you have already given to your customer. You want those documents to be the same.

Ah, that makes sense. But what happens if you WANT to apply the new changes on the Custom Template to an existing proposal? You’ll have to load those changes manually.

  1. Go to the Proposal > Reports (tab)
  2. Reselect the template in the Select Override Template dropdown
  3. You will be prompted to Update the Contract.
    • Click Proceed to update.
    • Click No to keep the original contract language.
  4. You may be prompted to Update the Payment Schedule
    • Click Proceed to update.
    • Click No to keep the original payment schedule
  5. You may be prompted to Update and Replace Labor Rates
    • Click Replace to update.
    • Click Nope! to keep the original labor rates

Note: If you only want to change the Payment Schedule, you can do the same process. Reselect the payment schedule in the dropdown, and iPoint will update the schedule on the proposal.


Once the contract details are entered above, you can click the View Contract button to see what it looks like. Incidentally, you can edit the contract here, too. Changing the text here does not affect the defaults set up in settings.

Payment Description sectionPayment Description section

Payment Description

The payment description section outlines when you expect payment from your customer. When printing your proposal, this payment structure can be included in the printed proposal either by selecting the Proposal Details With Grand Summary or the Grand Totals Summary page..

You can enter the payment description and values in three methods:

  1. If the Override Template has a payment schedule defined in settings, iPoint will copy it here.
  2. Choosing an Override Payment Schedule will also change these values.
    • Note: If a payment schedule has been entered, you will be prompted to override the displayed schedule with a new schedule from either of the dropdowns above. You can choose to accept the change or decline, keeping the existing values.
  3. You can manually enter the values by entering a description and then a percentage or dollar amount.
    1. Entering a percentage will cause iPoint to calculate the dollar amount.
    2. And entering a specific dollar amount will cause iPoint to calculate the percentage.
    3. Enter a Due Date

Note †: There is a setting to automatically create a two-line payment schedule, one line for labor and one for parts. You can find that setting in Settings > Custom Templates > Overrides > Payment Schedule > Special – Auto Split Parts Labor

Delete a payment schedule line by clicking the delete button at the right end of the line.


If you are billing your customers using the Summary Invoice or one of the RFP Accounting Methods, you will see a green Invoice button next to the first payment schedule. Use this button to create the first Request For Payment from your customer, also called a deposit.

Many companies will use this feature to ensure the deposit is received before converting the proposal to a sales order. This will keep products from being ordered and work scheduled until the customer has provided payment upfront.

At the bottom of the schedule are several self-calculating fields.

  • CheckSum Percentage – this shows the remaining percentage of the job to be added to the payment schedule. If the total of the payment lines is 90%, for example, the value of this field shows 10% indicating that another 10% needs to be added to the schedule. A balanced payment schedule will cause this field to be 0%.
  • CheckSum Dollar – this field is similar to the percentage field described above, except it displays the actual dollar amount. A balanced payment schedule will cause this field to be empty.
  • Contracted Grand Total – this is the total sale price of all items and labor defined in the Designer.
  • Percentage Lines – this shows the total percentage of all lines in the schedule. Using our example above, it would display 90% since that is the total of all the schedule lines.
  • Contracted Dollars – this value displays the total dollar of all lines in the schedule. If the proposed schedule is complete, it should equal the Contracted Grand Total. The field will turn yellow if the contract schedule is out of balance.

Common Errors

  • ? – the question mark in a percentage field indicates that the variation percentage is a multi-decimal value with more than one decimal place. For example, if a contract is out of balance by .01%, the percentage field will show ? because it can’t display two decimal places. This error is common when using specific percentage values that don’t add up to 100%. For example, if you request three even payments of 33.33%, the contract is technically short by .01%. Therefore, a*?* will be displayed since the field can’t show .01%, a ? will be displayed. The solution would be to change one of the three payments to 33.34%, causing the calculation to equal 100%.
  • Red Values: The numbers in the calculation fields will turn red if the system hasn’t had time to update the values. This occasionally occurs when a change has been made to the payment schedule or the values in the Designer, and the math script hasn’t had a chance to update the fields. Typically, the values will correct themselves if you leave and return to the proposal.
iPoint Version: 9.1006
Last modified: 28 Dec 2021

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