Proposals Are Poorly Formatted - Help :-)!
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David Haddad
I’ll preface by saying I’m very impressed by most of what I see in D-Tools Cloud. That said, I believe D-Tools should be burning the midnight oil to fast track two features above all else. The ability to present multiple alternatives without screwing up the proposal totals (roadmapped), and a massive improvement of the fit and finish of proposals. Please stop adding other features and first make the core functionality outstanding. I realize there is a highly voted request for proposal customization, but I'm starting a new request here because my focus is on improving what's out of the box first.
I literally had the managing director for our largest Client refuse to present a D-Tools proposal to him the other day because it was so confusing and poorly laid out compared to our manually done proposals.
His complaints were spot on and rather than attempt to explain them I’m attaching examples in attached screenshots. Our job as integrators is supposed to be to make technology easy to operate for our client. If they can’t even follow a proposal, that does not bode well for what we're telling them we're going to do.
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Steve Harman
The mobile proposal view can use a LOT of help! I've heard from several client recently that the proposals are very hard to read on a mobile device. For starters, line item pricing doesn't show up without clicking "View", then selecting the product, only to have a separate pop up window appear with the price listed in a tiny font. I have started downloading the PDF quote and emailing to clients vs. sending the D-Tools cloud version so their first experience with my quote isnt frustrating. It would be great to see positive change in this area since, I'm guessing, most of our client's open the quote on a mobile phone first, get very confused, then revisit on a computer when they can. Overall goal is to close deals quickly and give customers the tools they need to understand our complex designs quickly.
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Tim Mazur
Agreed. The proposal feel VERY 'trunk slammer" in my opinion and the idea that you are going to preset a proposal to a corporate client as a webpage is just silly. This means that things like alternates don't print out when downloading a pdf.
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Todd Forgan
Ability to select Page Breaks - make the Proposal MUCH more readable!!
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Kevin Morales
Todd Forgan: I'd also like to assign a certain Page Break Type to multiple sections (lets say the Project Summary + Payment Term sections) so when I select those two sections and assign Section Breaks as the Page Break Type, those sections are grouped together rather than ending up with separate pages for each and lots of empty space.
Also would like to have control of the Signature section which for some reason isn't visible when editing proposals?
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Mosey Levy
i was told this was fixed recently using this new option, but the results of the PDF are the same anyway. (Section Breaks or Continuous)
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Mosey Levy
Any updates on this?
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Chad Weuve
Cover Page Formatting
The ability to adjust the position of, and show / hide the following; company logo, company contact information, customer name, customer contact information, document title, document number, and date.
The ability to make the cover image full width and place the company logo and contact information on the image instead of in the sliver of white space to the right of the image (which looks like an afterthought).
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David Haddad
I'm so disappointed that 3 months later this is all we get.
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM
David Haddad: Hi David, we have plans to revisit our proposal in Q4 while we work on Project Management features through Q3. The latest changes were some quick updates from our end, but know we will get to this. Thanks for your patience and your feedback below :)
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David Haddad
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM: Thanks Nick. But can't you find the time to work in the ability to insert images into system descriptions? It already exists in the project description, and it's as if someone just turned it off, or didn't insert that line of code into system descriptions, which are otherwise identical to project descriptions. I'm not a software developer, but it seems like it would be a ridiculously simply thing to do.
Thanks,
David
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM
David Haddad: So this request doesn't get lost in the more general proposal improvements item, I added you as a voter onto this specific case
This is a valid case. Unfortunately not as easy as it has implications of how it looks on the quote. It is definitely solvable, and one we will keep in mind as we review our proposals in Q4
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Chad Weuve
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM: Which Q4 were you referring to? I assumed you meant Q4 2020, but we are now in Q3 2021 and this is still listed under "Planned" and not "In Progress". This is such an important feature and is the main reason that I signed on with D-Tools Cloud to begin with.
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David Haddad
Chad Weuve: I canceled and unfortunately just had to extend my subscription for one more month because I didn't have time to export everything out. And as you can see....crickets....that means "we don't think it's an issue because not everyone complains".
In the meantime a $20 a month proposal program like Panda Doc can create stunning beautiful proposals that win projects. Does it have all the data? No, which why I subscribed to D-Tools. But at least we can create beautiful proposals with Panda or similar. Beyond disgusted that such ridiculously basic stuff is not addressed...:-( :-(
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Chad Weuve
David Haddad: I hate to say it but I have been considering an alternative as well, it's unfortunate because this solution has so much potential. Despite my initial concerns with the limitations on proposal formatting, I took a leap of faith with D-Tools Cloud because most of the feature requests I was interested in were on the roadmap but D-Tool's ability to follow through has been quite underwhelming.
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM
We added a few small improvements last week to the proposal. We are aware they are minor but hopefully will have an impact on readability for your clients. Leaving this open as we will continue to iterate on the proposal but wanted to let you know we added the following improvements:
- Increased the space between each location to visual separate them from one another
- Always show the left navigation as expanded
- Showing a hover state when mousing over a product to show its clickable
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Test User
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM: awesome very helpful already
Nick - D-Tools Cloud PM
We are planning some improvements to this proposal that will help differentiate locations/systems in your products view. I think we can look to better design these sections though that will take more work and something that will have to be revisited again in our roadmap. I will leave this open as we add this to our roadmap, just know some improvements coming.
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Lanza AV
All great points. Formatting the proposal is key to understanding and acceptance by customer.
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