What is a Quote Layout?
Having a professional, branded quote layout is essential for establishing brand consistency and recognition, ensuring that potential clients can easily identify your business and trust it's professionalism. A clean, well-organized layout improves clarity and readability, making key information like pricing, terms, and deliverables easy to understand and reducing the risk of misunderstandings. A polished quote also elevates the perceived value of your offerings, positioning your services or products as high-quality and worth the investment. In competitive markets, a professional quote helps you stand out, while its structure promotes efficient communication, ensuring both you and the client are aligned. Ultimately, a branded quote builds trust, showcasing your attention to detail and reliability, and helping clients feel confident in their decision to work with you.
In QuoteWerks, you can customize quote layouts to align with the style and branding of your other customer communications. You have full control over fonts, logos, colors, icons, and more. With QuoteWerks, you can easily personalize an existing template to create your own unique design, allowing you to deliver polished, professional quotes in no time.
What is the Layout Designer?
The Layout Designer is a versatile tool that lets you create custom layouts from scratch or modify existing ones to fit your needs. You can access it through the deliver window by selecting "New," "Edit," or "Clone." Choosing "New" opens a blank layout, "Edit" allows you to update an existing layout, and "Clone" lets you create a copy of an existing layout, which you can then adjust and save separately from the original. While many users prefer to rebrand existing layouts, you also have the flexibility to design layouts from the ground up. The Layout Designer offers a variety of design tools, enabling you to control colors, fonts, fields, labels, page layout, and more. The key to building an effective layout is organizing fields and labels in a way that’s both intuitive and provides the clearest representation of your quote information.
Fields in QuoteWerks are sourced from various tables within the system, such as DocumentHeaders, DocumentItems, Application, and Contact Mgr. The DocumentHeaders table includes details about the document, such as sold-to/ship-to information, prepared by, document date/name, and custom fields. The DocumentItems table holds information about the items listed in the document, including item cost/price, quantity, line attributes, and custom fields. The Application table contains data about your company, users, location, and more. Finally, the ContactMgr table allows you to pull fields from your integrated CRM/PSA solution.
Each time you select a layout from the deliver window, the layout will be populated with information from the currently open document. For example, we may want our sold to company and contact information to display on the quote layout. To do this we can choose the specific contact fields we would like to include, create a label to designate what this field is and anytime the layout is used, it will populate with information from the currently open document.
This same process of adding fields can be used for any of the information being pulled from the tables outlined above, including item information.
Layout Designer Best Practices
The layout designer can be used to design custom layouts, meaning the output can vary greatly from one layout to the next. While it’s output can be highly customized, there are a few best practices anyone can follow to help in designing a layout.
Layout Designer Best Practices
1. Start from an existing layout or sample – Begin with a sample layout, or if you're designing one from scratch, create a mockup of your desired design. Having a reference layout, or at least a version of your vision, provides a solid starting point to guide the development of your layout.
2. Make sure to include your logo – A layout should feature your company logo. You can place your logo directly on the layout or use the CompanyLogo field from the Application table to pull your logo from the Company Logo field on the Company page.
3. Change colors and fonts to match your brand standards – Colors, fonts, and general iconography can be added directly to the quote using the layout designer and the add picture option. Branding your quotes makes sure that they are in alignment with other company documents and represent your company in the best way possible.
4. Ensure all pertinent quote information is included – Make sure to include product information like price, quantity, extended price, and more to ensure your products are represented well on the quote. You can also add formatting for line types like headings and summary lines and include pictures that are associated with the quote items.
5. The QuoteWerks Technical Support team is here to help - If you would prefer, QuoteWerks offers professional services which can be leveraged to have the team design your layouts for you. If you are interested in these services, contact the QuoteWerks sales team for more information.
Following these best practices will help you to get up and running quickly with a new, customized quote layout.
For more information on the Layout Designer check out these videos:
- QuoteWerks Layout Designer [Beginner]
- QuoteWerks Layout Designer [Intermediate]
- QuoteWerks Layout Designer [Advanced]
If you have any questions, call us at 407-248-1481 to speak with one of our representatives today, available 9AM-5PM Eastern, Monday through Friday. You can also email us at sales@quotewerks.com or contact your QuoteWerks Reseller.
For international customers and technical support, click here.
