Letting a client adjust a quote — Help

Most quotes are not one number. The client wants to know what six hours of coverage costs, and what ten costs. They want to know what the second shooter adds. They are somewhere between 60 and 90 guests and will not know which until the RSVPs are in.

The usual answer is to send two or three near-identical quotes and let them pick. That works badly for everyone. You maintain three documents that have to stay in step, and the client ends up with three links in their inbox and no idea which one is live. Accept the wrong one and the event is built on the wrong figures.

An adjustable quote replaces all of that with one document. You set the limits, the client moves inside them, and the total updates as they go. What they accept is what gets billed.

Switching it on

It is off until you turn it on. Account, Invoice settings, "Let clients adjust a quote".

Switching it on changes nothing on its own. It adds the controls to the quote editor, and nothing becomes adjustable until you say so on a particular quote. Quotes you have already sent are untouched.

Leave it off and quotes behave exactly as they always have.

The four things a client can change

A quantity range on a line. "Coverage, 6 to 10 hours". The client gets a stepper bounded by your minimum and maximum, and the line total moves with it.

An optional extra. "Second shooter", "Ceremony musicians", "Late bar extension". The client ticks it on or off. You decide whether it starts ticked.

The guest count. One number above the lines that drives every line marked per person at once. Quote for 67, let them settle at 73, and the canapes, the mains and the beverage package all rescale together.

The guest count sits on the document rather than on each line deliberately. A client who raises the canapes to 73 and leaves the mains at 67 has not written a quote, they have written an invoicing mistake.

The start time. "Booking starts at 6pm, and you can move it between 5pm and 8pm." The client picks a start inside your window and the document says when the booking starts and finishes. It sits above the lines with the guest count, because it belongs to the booking rather than to any one line.

The length of the booking is not set here. That is the quantity on whichever line you mark as the hours, so a client who drags coverage from six hours to ten moves the finish time with it.

Setting the limits

Open the quote in the editor. Every line grows a small Client options button. Open it and you get:

Client can change the quantity. Tick it, then set From, to, and in steps of. Leave the step blank for 1. A range of 6 to 10 in steps of 0.5 gives half-hour increments; a range of 1 to 4 in steps of 1 gives whole units.
Client can add or remove this line. Tick it to make the line optional, and then Include it in the quote to start with decides whether the client's quote arrives with it on or off. Ticked, the line is in the quote and in the total and the client can take it out. Unticked, it is an extra shown with its price that only joins the total if the client picks it. An extra you expect most people to want should start on; a genuine upsell should start off.
This line's quantity is how many hours the booking runs. One line per quote can say so. From then on the document prints when the booking starts and finishes, counting the hours from the start time above the lines, so the header moves with the stepper instead of contradicting it.
A note under the control. Free text, up to 300 characters, shown to the client under the stepper or the tick. This is where the selling happens: "most weddings this size book 8 hours", "covers the ceremony only", "priced per hour after 11pm". Use it.

A line marked per person does not get a range of its own. It follows the guest count, and the panel says so.

The guest count control sits above the lines: Client can change the guest count, with a minimum and a maximum. Set the bounds to something you can actually deliver. The kitchen and the room capacity are the real limits, so the quote should carry them.

The booking times sit beside it:

Booking starts at. Type the time however you say it out loud. "6pm", "745pm" and "1930" all land as 6:00 PM, 7:45 PM and 7:30 PM, the same as the lead form and the run of show. Leave it blank and the quote uses the time already on the booking.
Client can change the start time. Tick it, then set From, to, and in steps of in minutes (30 if you leave it blank). Both ends are needed before the client gets a picker: a start time moves no money, so an open-ended window would hand out a dawn start for free. While only one end is filled in, the panel says the window is not live yet and the quote just shows the fixed start.

Small badges appear beside any line that has something switched on, so a long quote can be scanned for what is open without opening every panel: Client can change the quantity, either Client can remove or Client can add depending on which way the line starts, and Sets the booking times on the line that carries the hours.

Set the options before you send. Like everything else on a quote, the options are frozen the moment it goes out, so the client cannot have the offer changed underneath them. To change what is on offer after sending, copy the quote to a new one (a copy keeps the offer it made) and send that. Raising an invoice from a quote deliberately drops the options: an invoice is the record of what was agreed, and "adjustable, 6 to 10" on one reads like a live offer to whoever looks at it next.

Setting them once, on the item

If the same line carries the same offer on every quote, save the options on the catalog item instead of building them again each time. An item in Items has its own Client options panel with the same controls (the quantity range, the optional extra, the hours line and the note), and every line built from that item arrives on a quote already offering them.

They are a starting point, not a rule: open the line's own panel and change anything you like for this one client. Editing the item later does not reach back into quotes already built from it. See Your items catalog and packages.

What the client sees

They open their quote link the way they always would. An adjustable quote looks like a quote, with four differences:

A Guest count box above the lines, with your range printed beside it ("50 to 120 guests").
A stepper in the quantity column on any line you opened up, with the range printed underneath so a stepper that stops moving does not read as a broken page.
A tick beside the name of any optional line.
A Start time picker above the lines when you opened the start up, with your window printed beside it, and the booking's start and finish printed on the document itself once a line is marked as the hours.

Every change re-prices the whole document immediately: subtotal, tax, service charge, gratuity and the total, all the way down. There is no "calculate" button and nothing to submit.

A declined extra stays on the page, faded, with "Not included" where its price would be. Removing it would make switching something off a one-way door with no way back to it. It is not priced, not taxed, and it is not billed.

The limits are enforced on our side, not by the browser. The stepper's minimum and maximum are a convenience for the person using it. Whatever actually arrives is checked again against your range before it becomes money, so nobody can talk the page into a quantity you did not offer.

The PDF the client downloads, and the print view, both show what they have currently configured, so they cannot end up holding a PDF that quotes a different total from the page they were looking at. The PDF lists only the priced lines: printing extras they have already declined would read as though they were still on the table.

When they accept

Accepting resolves everything at once and builds the booking from what they chose, not from what you first offered:

The event's pricing sheet is seeded from their quantities, their guest count applied to every per-person line, and their declined extras absent entirely. An extra somebody said no to can never be billed by accident.
The guest count they agreed lands on the event as the guaranteed pax, so the BEO, the kitchen and the reports all count against the figure that was actually agreed, with nobody retyping it.
The agreed start and finish land on the booking when a line is marked as the hours, so the calendar, the run of show and everyone working from them show the times that were actually agreed rather than the ones you first drafted. A booking that runs past midnight rolls the finish onto the next day.
The totals are frozen onto the quote at that moment. That is the one time a configured quote's reportable figure is written.

Until they accept, every report keeps showing your own figure. A client dragging a stepper around has agreed to nothing, and letting that reach your pipeline would inflate the forecast off somebody who was only browsing.

After they accept, the figure they built is what shows: on the Quotes report, in the quote list, on the lead's quote card, and in a proposal that embeds the quote. All four used to be capable of disagreeing. They now read one number.

You are told what moved

An acceptance on an adjusted quote does not arrive looking like any other acceptance.

A plain account of what changed is written into the lead conversation, and a one-line version goes into the notification subject, so the bell entry says the booking changed without you having to open the thread to find out that it did. It reads something like:

They adjusted the quote before accepting it:

Guest count: 67 to 73

Coverage: 6 to 10

Added: Second shooter

Total: $4,200, now $6,150

A moved start time is listed the same way ("Start time: 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM"), and when the booking's own times moved, a line underneath says so in as many words: "The booking now runs 7:00 PM to 1:00 AM the next day, and the event has been updated to match." That one is spelled out because it is the change that edited your calendar rather than only your bill.

Guest count leads, because it has the widest blast radius. The total is given as before and after, because "now $6,150" on its own leaves you to remember what it was.

When something that moves the day moved, and not just the bill, whether that is the hours, the guest count or the start time, a line is added underneath:

Worth checking anything that keys off this: crew call times, access and vacate, and what the kitchen is counting on.

That warning is the honest part of this feature, and it is worth reading twice. 1pm does not reconcile the operational consequences of a change. Moving photography from six hours to ten really moves call times, access and vacate, and what the kitchen is counting on, and the software does not know that. It will not pretend to. What it will do is never let a quietly different booking land looking like an ordinary one.

Swapping an optional extra changes the bill rather than the schedule, so it does not raise the warning. That is deliberate too: a sentence that appears every time is a sentence people learn to skim past.

A quote nobody adjusted produces no summary at all and reads exactly as it always did.

Unaccepting

Unaccepting a quote releases the client's picks so the controls work again, because the quote is going back on the table and leaving it locked would hand them a live quote whose steppers all refuse to move.

Their choices survive, so it reopens on what they chose rather than back at your original figures. The frozen totals are cleared, because nothing is agreed any more and the reports have to stop saying it is.

If the quote and the pricing sheet stop agreeing

There is one path worth knowing about, and it is not specific to adjustable quotes: unaccept, change something, re-accept.

When you accept a quote onto an event whose pricing sheet already has charges on it, the sheet is deliberately left alone. Re-seeding it would throw away everything added since and break the link that keeps billed lines marked as billed. So the quote can end up saying one figure while the sheet says another, and the sheet is what invoices and confirmations are priced from.

The quote now says so, in as many words, and offers to replace the sheet wholesale with the quote's lines. That offer is refused once anything points at the sheet, and it names which of the two is in the way:

Some of these charges have already been billed on an invoice.
A payment has already been recorded against the event.

In either case, edit the lines that changed instead. A confirmation whose frozen pricing has drifted from the sheet flags it the same way, worded by status: replace an unsigned one, and leave a signed one alone, because it is the record of what was actually agreed.

What this deliberately does not do

Choose-one groups. Silver, Gold and Platinum, or a three-course against a five-course, where picking one rules out the others. Not built yet. Today the nearest equivalent is optional lines, which the client can tick independently.

An approval step. There is no "the client has requested changes, approve or decline" queue. The bounds you set are the approval. If you would not sign off on ten hours, do not offer ten hours.

Anything on invoices or confirmations. Options are a quote-stage idea only.

Discounts, prices or the date. The client can change quantities, extras, the guest count, and the start time inside the window you set. They cannot touch your unit prices, your tax treatment, or the date the event falls on.

Quotes and invoices covers the editor itself, sending, and what each stage means.
Pricing an event covers the pricing sheet the accepted quote seeds.
Your items catalog and packages covers saving these options on an item so every quote starts with them.
Proposals covers the longer client-facing document a quote can sit inside.
When a quote runs out covers the validity window and what a client sees after it.