How to manage proposal Alternates/Options in Knowify

For some jobs, you may wish to provide your client with multiple options, or alternates, for how the job can be preformed. For example, if you were building a Koi Pond for a client you may also want to provide the option to add a waterfall feature, or to stick with a more basic build. Knowify provides a number of workflows that allow you to achieve this goal based on how you would like to present the Alternate to your clients, and what works best for you! 

Breakdown of Materials

Once you have completed your base proposal, add a designated line item for 'Alternates' and set it to $0. Add your alternate options as a Breakdown of Materials. (Ensure you have your proposal set to display Breakdown of Materials and Line Item Subtotals.)

This will allow you to show the alternate prices without them factoring into the bid total:

Add Line Item & Descriptions

You can prominently display your alternate options as line items with $0 totals to put them front and center on your proposal! Enable the setting ‘Hide line item subtotals’ from the Proposal screen in Knowify. and (optionally) include the price of each alternate in your description boxes, as this will still show on your proposal.

Verify your output settings at the bottom of the 'Contract and Change orders' page of Knowify:

This will create a total bid that shows the contract with possible alternates, that does not include alternates in the base price, with the option to display alternate prices as needed:

Copy Job

If you’d like your alternate proposals to be completely self contained, we recommend making use of Knowify’s copy job feature! Simply create your base bid, then copy the job as many times as you need!

From here you can edit each version of the job independently, adding items to Plan and Track and Contract as needed to create alternate versions of the job for your client.

Change Orders

To start, create your base bid, or the part of your job that will not change as a standard bid via line items on your job.

Create a change order for each alternate version of your job, including details, BOM, and pricing and send these to your client for approval. Your client then approves only the Change Orders they wish to move forward with. This is a great way to mix and match options for your client and allow them to select exactly which add-ons they want to move forward with!

Download as Word and make changes outside of Knowify

Each proposal in Knowify can be downloaded as a Word document. You always have the option to download the proposal, manually make changes to the pricing/display outside of Knowify, and present this to the client. Once you have approval you can update and manually approve the contract in Knowify to begin officially tracking your costs and progress!