How to Custom Quote in Dubsado

Problem: Your pricing is highly customized and you don’t know how to streamline the quoting process in Dubsado.

I often hear from frustrated creatives like cake designers and florists who are struggling to create custom quote in Dubsado in an efficient way. They say, “I can’t use packages templates in Dubsado because everything I do is custom quoted.”

Instead, you’ve resigned to creating every invoice from scratch… creating the line item, choosing a name and description, selecting a category, and defining the quantity, price, and tax… every time! This is not a good use of your precious time or mental energy.

But there is a better way – and yes, it involves package templates. 🙂 Even if your pricing varies dramatically, you can still create pricing templates that captures what is consistent in your offering.

Using package templates as a starting point saves the time and headache of having to create every single invoice completely from scratch. Plus, it ensures consistency in your client experience.

Here what you need to know to easily create a custom quote in Dubsado.

First, let’s talk about Packages (aka: pricing)

The Packages area is found in the Templates section. The term Packages is a bit misleading for designers and custom quoters; if it helps, think of it more generically as Pricing!

You’ll want to enter pricing for anything that you need to sell or invoice through Dubsado. This may be wedding cakes, sheet cakes, cookies – even things like cake stand rentals and delivery. Each of these items can be created individually as a package in Dubsado.

Solution: Create Custom Quotes using Placeholder Pricing

Step 1: Create Your Package Templates using Placeholder Pricing

Go ahead and create your own packages (pricing) of individual items. Don’t worry if the pricing of those items will change every single time (like for wedding cakes)! You can update the pricing for a particular client after it’s applied to their proposal or invoice. For now, use placeholder pricing in your template. I recommend either using your minimum pricing or simply $0 to remind you that it needs to be filled in later.

In the examples below, the designer prefers to charge by slice. We’ve used her starting price of $10 per slice as the placeholder pricing for custom cakes and $3.50 per slice for custom cakes.

Now that your individual items have been added, you may want to create packages with multiple line items.

Let’s take a wedding cake, for example. You may like to itemize your invoices to show pricing for the wedding cake, delivery, and maybe a cake stand. (This is helpful because each of these individual line items can have unique pricing, accounting categories, and tax statuses.)

Follow the same process as above, except this time you’ll add multiple line items to the package. Here are two examples of what your template could look like:

If you’re using $0 as your placeholder pricing, your package totals will look weird. Remember, you’ll update the pricing on the proposal or invoice before sending to your clients, so it doesn’t matter that it looks goofy right now.

Step 2: Add Your Package(s) to a Proposal Template

Now that you have all of your pricing loaded into the package templates, you’re ready to modify/create a proposal to house your custom quote. Go to Templates > Forms > and select your Proposal (or create a new one). You’ll want to make sure you include at least one package block here. (You may want to add a few different options so that when you go to edit the proposal for a specific client, you can easily delete out anything that’s not needed.)

Select the package(s) you’d like to add.

Before saving your template, let’s check a few things in your Form Settings (click the gear icon on the left). Make sure you check “Include Invoice” if you want your client to be able to make a payment immediately after accepting the proposal. You may also want to check “Allow client to choose multiple packages” if you want to offer optional upgrades in your proposal. Click Save Form at the top when you’re finished.

Step 3: Add the Proposal to a Client Project to Create your Custom Quote

Now, let’s move out of the Templates area and go into a client project and make specific edits there. In the project, go to Forms > Add New Form > select your form > Add > Edit. Select the package you want to edit. Once you click on it, you’ll see a menu pop up on the left hand side. Click Edit Package.

Now you will see an editable version of your custom quote template. Make any edits you need to make right here by clicking the tiny carrots next to each line item to either “edit” or “remove” the line item altogether. The changes you make here will NOT affect your master template as this is a copy that lives only in your client project.

Click Apply to save your changes.

There you have it – you just created your custom quote in Dubsado! Now save your form, send it off, and wait for that booking to come in. Once the client select the package and submits the proposal, an invoice will be created for them. If they do not submit the proposal, the invoice will not be created.

Another Way to Custom Quote: Create an Invoice

You can also use an invoice to send your custom quote to a prospective client, but I don’t typically recommend this. Sending a quote is simply a way to provide an estimated cost of your service; it doesn’t mean the prospective client is obligated to accept or pay. Creating an invoice is like skipping over that approval process and assuming that every prospective client will move forward with you. Creating invoices for every lead also creates a bit of a mess as you will have to go back and delete invoices for everyone who do not end up booking with you.

However, situations will inevitably come up where you will need to create invoices for client. I’d like to show you how!

First, go into your client project and find the Invoice tab. Click the “add” button to create a new invoice.

This is the part where you would have had to create every single item from scratch. Instead, you can now add items with just a few clicks! Simply click the “Packages” button and select whatever you’d like to add. (Hint: you can add multiple packages if needed.)

Next, update the pricing and description as needed.

Now you’re ready to send that invoice! It could look something like this:

Or this:

After reading this, do you feel confident in creating a custom quote in Dubsado? Tell me what you think in the comments!