Multi-option approvals on estimates allow you to specify if your customer is able to approve only one, or multiple options in a single estimate.
In this article, you'll find the information on how to:
Adjust the approval settings on an individual estimate basis
Define the default approval settings for all your future estimates
The approval settings allow you to specify how many options your customers can approve in multi-option estimates received by emails or texts. There are two different settings:
"Only one option" - when your customer approves one option, the rest will automatically be declined. You will still be able to "pro-approve" other options on your end
"Multiple options" - when your customer approves one option, the rest won't be declined. Both the you and the customer will still be able to approve other options
By default, the approval settings for all your estimates will allow your customers to approve only one option. This is equivalent to the system's behavior before the multi-option approvals feature was introduced, which means that nothing will change for your customers until you decide to change the settings.
Changing the approval settings for an individual estimate
To change the approval settings for a given estimate, click the "Customer can approve" component on the Estimates details page:
This will open a modal with two possible options. Click the radio button next to the approval settings you wish to apply for the estimate and click save to confirm the choice:
Changing the approval settings on the "Estimate details" page of a given estimate will only affect that particular estimate.
Expected customer experience
If you choose "only one option", your customer will be able to approve only one option in the estimate. Once they approve the desired option, the remaining options will be declined automatically.
On the other hand, if you choose "multiple options", your customer will be able to approve as many options in the estimate as they wish. NOTE: if multiple options are approved by the customer, you must still copy each approved option to a job. The approved options will not be automatically combined and copied to one single job. You can manually add the line items from other approved options if they need to be included on one invoice/job.
Default approval settings
Suppose you want to apply the same approval behavior for all or most of the estimates you send to your customers. In that case, specifying the default approval settings is a good idea. These settings will be applied to estimates you created in the future.
To access the default approval settings, click the "cog" icon in the top right corner:
Then, navigate to the "Estimate defaults" section:
This section contains the approval settings that can be applied by default to all estimates you create in the future. Click the "pencil" icon to change them.
Remember that you can always overwrite the default settings for individual estimates (by changing the settings on the "Estimate details" page for the given estimate).
Important considerations
No matter what approval settings are set to your estimates, you will always be able to pro-approve options on your end.
The approval settings state can't be changed for an estimate if the approval settings are set to "multiple options" and two or more options are already approved (either by the customer or pro-approved in HCP). In such a case, the component to change the settings is disabled, and the appropriate information is displayed on hover:
For now, this feature works on the web only, but we plan to add it on mobile soon. It's important to remember that the approval settings specified on the web will propagate to estimates created and/or sent from mobile apps. For example, if you set the default approval settings to "Customer can approve multiple options", and you create and send a multi-option estimate from a mobile app, your customer will be able to approve more than one option.
The approval settings work for all estimates. They also work for the newly created Sales Proposal Tool 2.0. So, if you have access to SPT 2.0, you can use the same approval settings to adjust the approval behavior for all your estimates and proposals. The settings won't work for the proposals created with the old version of the tool, though. Click here to read more about the Sales Proposal Tool 2.0.