How Renada builds one PDF proposal that reprices itself on a button click

Connor: Hello, good day. I'm back once again with another video. I'm going to do something a little bit different today. I'm going to show you something that's really cool, then take it away from you a little bit, and then kind of tell you how we can potentially leverage it.

Essentially what I'm talking about today is dynamic proposals, or really proposals in general. Now you can take this as I don't know how to word it really, it's fantastic but also really cumbersome. Now it really depends on the level of technicality you have within the business, how much time you want to put into this. But my job today is just to show you that it's possible and how we use it.

I try and typically avoid showing you anything in my live production environment because typically it's a bit of a nightmare for me to sensitise it all. However in this scenario we spent quite a bit of time tailoring this because it really benefits us, so I thought I would go ahead and show you how we do it. So let's get straight into it.

Today so we're talking about proposals, okay? Now any good sales team really will have some sort of proposal document and it just kind of depends where you're writing your business. You may only be taking on a new customer every six months or every three months and you might just have a Word document. It's very typical, right? You will slightly tailor it, add some text into it and away you go.

Slightly different for my line of work. You know, we send out proposals daily pretty much, to be honest. And we need to be able to churn them out really quickly but also tailor them quickly and make them personalised. So we don't just want to send the same piece of paper out to everyone, even though for the most part I would say 95% of it is always the same.

But I will shut up talking and I will just go ahead and explain. So this is our production environment and this is what we work out of every single day. And what I'm just going to do is make a new opportunity. And what I have is some fake information down here. So we have the email address is DL, I'm not going to try and pronounce that, freki, maybe darl freki. He's reached out to us if I could even use a keyboard for some consultation. Apparently he's from this company name here, and that is all I'm going to fill out for the time being.

I'm just going to put he is in the United Kingdom and he can be in Trafford, okay, cool. And I'm not going to go through our full proposal in, but essentially this customer wants to know more about our onboarding services. Now depending on when or where you get an opportunity you may or may not fill some of this information out. I'm just going to say at the minute we don't have anything. I'm just going to say my next date needs to be tomorrow and submit.

Now this next bit is what I'm kind of showcasing. So this next bit is our how we send our proposals out to our customers. So the first thing that we do is we have this button up here called design offering. Now all this is really doing is applying a bunch of custom fields to the ticket and I'll demonstrate that.

So what do they want an offering for? Is it HaloPSA or HaloITSM? That is because we as a business offer both HaloPSA onboarding and consultation and HaloITSM onboarding and consultation. Now we do other services but at the minute my sales team or me would never quote or propose anything out. It would be me on a very one-to-one basis.

If you're an MSP this could be new hardware, this could be new managed service provision, this could be a project, an installation, a decommission, whatever you wanted. And you could basically start having these fields populate. And I'll show you in a minute what I mean. So I'm just going to say they want an offering for a HaloPSA offering.

And the next thing it asked me is what currency is that going to be in? So we obviously operate internationally, so we have GBP, USD, CAD, and Euro. I'm just going to put today is GBP. Then we have two costings. So we're very transparent with our prices. Our website is currently offline, but we basically sell two packages, a 15 or a 25 hour package. And those packages are fixed cost. It's either £3,150 for 15 hours or it's £4,950 for 25 hours. And that's the same across both of our packages.

Basically, depending on the currency it will obviously show this accelerated cost in the different currency. This is because we've hardcoded this in. So I'm just going to say GBP is £3,150. We then have different consultancy rates. Now currently these are going to be static, but again if I was to select USD the consultancy rate would then show in dollar as opposed to GBP. So I'm just going to put £3,150. That means the consultancy rate is this, this means our virtual admin rate is this, and how many hours is that? Well, because I've selected £3,150 that automatically determines this is going to be a 15 hour package. If I made this to £4,950 it would show 25 hours.

Now what's the point of this you might say? Well, it means if anyone in the team starts doing proposals, they select the first thing and everything else is uniformed. You'll then see here we have different sign off texts and onboarding texts. Now you'll notice in here that it says the integration of your organisation into HaloPSA. If I was to select HaloITSM it would say integration of your organisation into HaloITSM.

Now we could just have it so that single word changes, but I think our verbiage over time is going to change. And again, this is currently geared towards onboardings. And again as we iterate, as we grow, there's going to be more different texts in here, different things we can select and again making these dynamic proposals. So I'm just going to select the only options we have and click save.

All that does is that basically writes them to this offering detailed page. Now it will add some other bits and pieces in some of the tabs. I won't go into the logistics of why that is, but we have different things in different places, but it essentially writes all that data to the ticket.

What that allows us to then do is click this button here which is create offering. And basically what that's doing is that is creating a PDF document on the ticket using the custom fields from the ticket. And I will explain how this works. And I'm just going to go ahead and click save.

Now the only annoying thing with this at the minute is that it makes the document as ticky report, because that's what it is. So what I currently do is I just come in here and rename this to be proposal. This is because I will typically email this out to the customer. And I'll click save. And what I end up with is a proposal PDF.

And you'll see here that it pulls in this month because we are in October. You will see it says Halo because these are Halo project proposals. And you'll see it's presented to darl, that is the customer's name that I made at the start of this proposal.

So we're pulling information from the ticket. Then when we go down and look at our pricing structure, you will see that we selected £3,150 and you will see that we selected £250 and £200. Again, when we were making that proposal we selected these fields.

Now a lot of this information is rigid. So if we do accelerate, you know, the verbiage remains the same, and the same for consultation and virtual admin. But what's really important for us is we can quickly get a proposal out in the preferred currency with the preferred rates and preferred values, if you will, on here.

And again, everything else is uniformed. You saw me select different verbiage, so you remember it says integration of HaloPSA. So it adds this information in here. And again, this is all based around onboarding. Currently, this is the main thing that we kind of send proposals for.

And again, down here a little bit information about me and Robbie, so who we are, what we do, why the company is formed, what we're aiming to do. And essentially this is what we send out.

Now if the customer goes, actually Connor, we want you to give us your 25 hour package, what we have to do is click design offering again, change this down here, change the fields that are required, and click save. Create the offering, which will then create another document with those fields on it, click save.

And again, we have then another attachment. I won't rename it as how, just open it, but again you'll now see it's updated the £4,950 price in here. And essentially that is that. This is our onboarding timeline, this is our proposal document.

So I think this is really nice. Now what's the point of this video? Well, the point of this video is to show you that it can be done and you can make what I like to call dynamic proposals. And I want to show you a little bit how we've kind of achieved it.

So the first thing is this design offering button. What is that actually doing? Well, this is super simple. As I mentioned, this is just adding those custom fields to the ticket. So if I go to tickets in action and I do design offering, maybe second page here we go. Design offering. What is that doing? Well, that has no system use. It is literally just updating a bunch of custom fields we've made so we can add all those custom fields to the ticket.

Then you'll say, well, what is the create offering button doing? Well, the create offering button also has no system use, but if you go to the default page, he says he says details page, it's in here somewhere. No, it is here. We go. You can have this report settings and basically you can attach a ticket PDF report to that ticket.

And what we have is a singular button. So this create offering makes the Renada HaloPSA offering. It makes that ticket PDF report. This is just a play hard. I don't worry about that. And essentially that's that.

So how do we click all these pieces together? Well, we know we have all these custom fields on the ticket. We know we have a HaloPSA offering PDF being created upon an action button. But how does it get the custom field on the ticket onto this PDF document? And what even is this PDF document? Where is it even stored?

Well, let's talk about that a little bit, shall we? So if we go to documents in the left-hand side, you will see we're now functioning within the tickets PDF template. So we're not operating under documents for quotations or invoices. This is purely for tickets. And if we click on that and we go to pages and I generate this PDF, just open up this, you will see that it takes the information from the last one we created, which again has all this information here.

So what does it look like on the actual template? Well, I'm not going to get too much in the weeds of how this works, but essentially what we've done is we've written the HTML. And essentially what we're pulling in, if you can see this, I know it's rather small, is the variables.

So we say on the front page the supporting text is Halo dollar consultation type. We pull in the current date. We pull in certain company logos. The username that is the person on the ticket assigned to is the person or the agent that made the ticket. And it's simple as we're making these document templates and pulling in the variables.

So when I look at pricing, what we're saying is, let me just scroll past all the CSS, what we're saying is here dollar CF accelerate hours package.

So my advice, if you're wanting to start down this road, is if you don't have the skills in house to do the HTML, I would definitely look at outsourcing that. You know, you can get stuff on Fiverr. A lot of the Halo onboarding consultants do it. We offer it as a service, not explicitly unfortunately. We offer it as part of a package, but we can do it. Purely because these things often have scope creep and it's really hard to price these. I'm being honest. And that's why it's good to have it all mapped out beforehand.

So I would definitely go and sit in something like Canva or Photoshop, build out how you want your proposals to look, and then define on those proposals what can be dynamic. And then you can start building these out inside of Halo.

Again, I told you I would show you something quite cool and take it away again. The reason I take it away again is because this bit is the complicated bit. This is the bit that takes a lot of time. But it can be done. And that's all I'm going to show you today.

So to reiterate or to iterate one more time, you can make custom proposals inside of HaloPSA. And these can be leveraged in many ways. This is just an example of how we use it. We design our offering, which is add custom fields to a ticket. We then create a PDF document using the variables on the ticket to make what I call the dynamic proposal. And then we send that to our customer on initial conversation. And away we go.

And that is it. I'm going to leave that with you today as some food for thought. If nothing else, I've been Connor. Have a lovely day. Hope to see you all soon. Take care. Goodbye.