Proposal styles

Most contractors don't write one kind of proposal. A builder gets a tight document grouped by room with one price per room. A homeowner gets the work spelled out, line by line, with the tile named under each one. Same company, same prices, two completely different documents.

A style is one of those shapes, saved and named. You can have as many as you need, and every job picks one.

What a style holds

A style owns how a proposal looks and reads. It never touches what anything costs.

• Writing style — how much description each line carries, how the scope of work is written and how long it runs, and your Additional style rules: your voice, in plain words — whether you write as "we", how you speak to the client, how you open and sign off, the phrases you always use. Every proposal in the style is written in that voice.
• Layout & pricing — the Line breakdown (one line per room, per kind of work, or per component), Prices your client sees (a price on every line, one price per room, or the total only), whether the work is grouped by room, what gets folded into the line beside it, where tile and material details sit, and whether quantities show up in the line names.
• Payment schedule — its own, or the company schedule.

The Line breakdown also decides how a new scope draft is written for a job in that style. One line per room, or no choice at all, groups prep, waterproofing, grout and trim inside the tile line and puts demo and haul-off on one line. One line per kind of work or One line per component keeps each of those steps on its own line. Prep, waterproofing, grout, caulking, trim, haul-off or clean-up that the style folds into the line beside it is grouped either way. More in Reviewing the scope of work.

Your prices, your services, your pricing rules, your terms & conditions, your discounts and your logo stay company-wide. Those are the same no matter who's reading the proposal, which is exactly why their cards sit in the Every style group on the settings page.

The order the sections appear in belongs to the style too. In the Layout & pricing card, under Section order, drag scope, pricing, terms, photos, the agreement and the rest into the order you want, and every new proposal in that style starts that way. Any single proposal can still be rearranged from its print menu — see Printing and downloading a proposal.

How the settings page works

Everything lives under Settings → Proposal Settings. The page is an overview of cards, and each card shows a one-line summary of what's saved on it.

• Style tabs run across the top, one per style. Your default has a small dot next to its name. Below them sits the selected style's name, a small preview of how its proposals look, what it has learned from, and a setup meter ("8 of 9 set up"). A card is marked Set up only when a proposal needs it: no logo yet, or a payment schedule that doesn't add up to 100%. Optional extras — trust badges, credentials, terms and card payments — never mark a card, so skipping them is fine.
• This style — Writing style, Layout & pricing and Payment schedule. These belong only to the style tab you've selected.
• Every style — Branding & trust, Terms & conditions, Discounts & client options, and Expiration & reminders. Change these once and every style gets them.
• Getting paid — Delivery, and Invoices & receipts.

Tap a card to open it. On a computer it slides in from the right; on a phone it fills the screen. Each one has its own Save and Cancel and saves on its own — there's no Save button for the whole page. Close one with unsaved changes and it asks Discard changes? first, and your phone's Back button closes it too. A small chip at the top tells you how far a change reaches: Builder style (just that style), Every style, or Every job.

Sales team members can open every card and read everything, but they can't change anything.

Setting them up

The row of tabs at the top picks which style you're editing; the This style cards follow whichever tab is selected.

Add one with + New style. Name it whatever you call these jobs — Builder, Homeowner, Commercial.

The ▾ menu on each tab gives you:

• Rename — also where you tag a style with the kind of client it's for, which is what makes a job start in it automatically.
• Duplicate — copies the shape so you can take a working style and change one thing, instead of building a second one from scratch.
• Set as default — the style every job uses when nothing else applies.
• Delete — asks you where the jobs on that style should go. Proposals you've already built keep the shape they were written in; this only changes what gets built next.

[!note] If you've only ever had one style you'll see a single tab and nothing else changes — your proposals come out exactly as they do today. The rest of it (the client-type question on a new job, the style chip on the project page) appears the moment you make a second style.

How a job picks its style

In order:

1. The style you picked on the job itself.
2. The style tagged for that kind of client, if you tagged the job.
3. Your default style.

When you create a project you can say who it's for — Builder, Homeowner, Commercial, Other — and the style tagged for that kind of client gets picked for you. You can always override it.

On the project page, the style sits as a small chip next to the project type. Tap it to see which style this job is using and switch to another.

Once the proposal is built, the proposal page (Bid → ② Proposal) also shows it as a small chip in the Notes row under the proposal bar, like Homeowner style — once you have two or more styles, so you can tell which one this proposal used. Tap it to see what the style controls, and Change it in Proposal Settings to open the style's settings.

Switching on a job you've already quoted

A proposal keeps the shape it was written in. That's deliberate: a client might be holding it right now, and changing a setting shouldn't quietly rewrite a document that's already out.

So when you switch styles on a job with a proposal, you get a choice:

• Rebuild it now — writes the proposal again in the new style. Your pricing carries over; the layout changes.
• Just switch the project — leaves this proposal exactly as it is. The next one you build uses the new style.

How a style learns

You don't have to set all of this by hand. Each style gets better from two places:

• Proposals you upload. When you upload a past proposal, the review asks which of your styles it is — and it makes a guess first, based on the shape of the document. Whatever you confirm is the style that learns from it. That includes your voice: how you refer to yourself and the client, how long your sentences run, the phrases you reuse, how you open and close — with a few of your own words quoted as examples. It lands in one short Voice learned from your past proposals section in that style's Additional style rules, refreshed each time the style learns — anything you write outside that section is never touched, so that's the place for your own final say.
• Proposals you send. Every proposal you actually send teaches the style it went out in. Drafts teach nothing, because a draft isn't how you write — it's how you were thinking.

Each style shows what it's learned from right under its name: "Learned from 2 uploads and 5 sent proposals, last updated Sep 8." A style that hasn't learned anything yet says so, and tells you the two ways to teach it.

[!tip] The fastest way to set up a second style is to upload one proposal written that way. Choose This is a new style in the review, name it, and most of the settings fill themselves in.

A couple of things worth knowing

There are no presets to pick any more. The old Concise / Detailed / Itemized presets and the Tone setting are gone — each setting has its own card, and your voice comes from your own proposals (or from what you write in Additional style rules). Nothing you'd already set changed.

You can tell Biddy instead. If you'd rather describe how you write than tick boxes, say so — "for builders I put one price on each room" — and Biddy will offer to save it. When you have more than one style, name the one you mean and it'll go to the right place.

Nothing here changes your numbers. Switching a job from one style to another changes how the work is presented and how finely it's broken down. Your day rate, your multipliers, your material costs and your margins are untouched.

A deleted style doesn't break old proposals. Anything already built keeps rendering exactly as it was sent.