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Pricing, cadences and VAT
Fixed fees, hourly work, estimates, recurring charges, and how each is shown to the client.
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Every fee line on a proposal has two settings: a Method, which decides how the amount is arrived at, and a Billing cadence, which decides how often it is charged. The fee table then groups the lines by cadence and prints each group with its own net, VAT and total.
The three methods
Fixed is one Amount. Most lines are this.
Hourly takes a Rate and Hours, and the fee is the two multiplied. If either box is empty, the Amount on the line is used instead, so an hourly line always has something to fall back on.
Estimate takes a From and a To. The fee counts at the lower figure only. The upper figure is shown to the client as a range and is never added into any total. Any group containing an estimate is labelled from, so the figure reads as the floor it is rather than as an exact price.
Cadences
One-off, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Every two months, Quarterly, Every six months, Annually.
This is how often you invoice, not how often the work is done. A payroll bureau running payroll weekly and billing monthly should choose Monthly. Choosing a cadence by the rhythm of the work puts the wrong period on the client's letter.
Fees on different cadences are never added together
This is the rule the whole fee table is built around. A one-off setup fee of 600 and a retainer of 400 a month are not 1,000 of anything. Neither is 100 a month plus 1,200 a year.
So each cadence is its own block on the letter, each with its own subtotal, its own VAT and its own total, and each labelled with the period it is charged over. There is deliberately no single figure combining them, on the proposal, on the fee table, on your list of proposals or anywhere else, and you should not write one into your covering note either.
The page your client reads says so in as many words underneath the table: fees are shown per billing period, and amounts for different periods are listed separately and are not added together.
VAT
A proposal has one VAT rate, and any individual service can carry its own rate instead. The figures are grouped by billing period and then by rate, so a group's own numbers always add up on their own, and the fee table prints one VAT line per rate in use. The ordinary case for an Irish practice is a service fee at 23% beside a filing fee that carries no VAT, on one letter.
A service with no rate of its own inherits the proposal's. A service you have deliberately set to zero keeps its zero, and is not pulled back up to the proposal's rate. That distinction is the whole point of setting a rate on a line.
You set a rate on a service once, in Proposals › Services, in the service's own VAT rate field, and every template and proposal built from it inherits that rate. Leave the field blank to use the rate on each proposal. You can also change a rate on a single line while building a proposal or a template, without touching the catalogue. Settings › Fees & defaults is where the proposal-level default lives.
CecurSign records a rate rather than a treatment. A line at 0% prints as 0%, and the letter does not describe it as exempt, zero-rated or outside the scope of VAT. If your client needs that distinction stated, put it in the wording of the service itself.
The other choice is whether the amounts you type are VAT-inclusive or VAT-exclusive. That describes how CecurSign should read what you typed, not what the table ends up showing: the subtotals printed on the letter are always net of VAT, with the VAT stated as its own line.
If every rate on the proposal is zero, or you are not VAT registered, no VAT wording appears at all. The figures print bare rather than with a nil VAT line beside them.
Currency
One currency per proposal. It arrives from the template the proposal was created from, and your catalogue has its own single currency taken from Settings › Fees & defaults.
Where the two differ, ticking a service brings its wording across but leaves the amount empty for you to type. Copying a figure from one currency into another would misprice the letter by whatever the exchange rate happens to be, so CecurSign will not do it.
Setting the defaults
Settings › Fees & defaults holds Default Currency and Default VAT Rate, which are applied to new proposals. They are seeded from your company region the first time, and a value you choose is never overwritten. Any proposal can still be set differently.
Lines with no price
A line with no amount contributes nothing and prints as a blank on a binding quote, which is why the builder flags it in amber and names it in the summary panel. A deliberate zero is different and counts as priced: it is how you say a service is included at no charge.