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Building your service catalogue
Set up the services you sell once, and reuse them on every proposal.
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Your catalogue is the list of everything your company sells, each entry written once with its usual price. Building a proposal is then ticking boxes rather than typing. It lives at Proposals › Services, and you add an entry with the Add service button.
If you are starting from nothing, Sample lists offers a ready-made set of sections and services to edit rather than a blank screen.
Adding a service
Add service opens a short form. Two of its fields do different jobs and are worth getting right the first time.
- Name and Section. The section is the grouping the service appears under, both here and on the proposal. Anything without one sits under Ungrouped.
- Description, marked prints in the proposal. This is the sales line: what the client is buying, in their language.
- Service schedule, marked prints in the engagement letter. This is the contractual scope: what you will do, and what you will not. It is the wording that binds you, and it goes to a different reader in a different document from the description above it.
Keeping those two apart is the point of the form. A scope written into the sales description ends up in the wrong document, and that is usually discovered after the letter has gone out.
The price
Under Default price you choose a Fee type and fill in what it needs.
- Fixed fee takes one Amount.
- Hourly takes an Hourly rate and Est. hours. If either is left blank, the Fixed fallback amount is used instead.
- Estimate (range) takes a From and a To. It is quoted from the lower figure; the upper one prints as a range and is never added into anything.
Billed sets how often the fee is charged: One-off, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Every two months, Quarterly, Every six months or Annually. That is how often you invoice, not how often the work happens. A payroll bureau that runs payroll weekly and bills monthly should choose Monthly.
Everything in the catalogue is priced in one currency, taken from Settings › Pricing & defaults. Set that before you price anything.
The price here is a default, not the price
Ticking a service onto a proposal copies its wording and its figures at that moment. It is not a link. Change a price here afterwards and proposals already built keep the figure they were built with, which is what stops last month's quote quietly rewriting itself.
The other side of the same rule: you can change any fee on any individual proposal without touching the catalogue.
Keeping the list tidy
- Offer this service is the tick that decides whether it appears when someone is pricing a proposal. Untick it to hide it without deleting it.
- Archiving is the stronger step, for things you no longer sell. Nothing is deleted outright, and you can restore it. Proposals already sent are untouched either way.
- A section can only be archived once its services have been moved or archived first.
- Reorder lets you set the order services appear in, by dragging a handle or with the up and down buttons. It is available when nothing is filtering or sorting the list.
An amber No price warning marks anything a proposal would quote nothing for. Healthy rows carry no badge at all, so the warnings stay visible.
Looking at one service
Clicking a service name opens its own page, which carries its price history and the proposals and templates it is used on. That is worth a look before you change a fee.