Creating a Word Template for a Bid

Bidding on new work is delicate. To give you maximum control over the bids you send out, Abio will merge information from your bid into custom MS Word templates.

You’ll do this by creating an MS Word document with your own company branding. You can start by modifying the sample we include with Abio. Incorporate your logo, your company’s colours, and the fonts and styles you normally use.

Next, select which parts of your bid you want to include, and where. You’ll be including the fields as bookmarks. Don’t worry, we’ll give you a list of field names you can select from.

Finally, use the ‘View Quote in Word’ feature on the quote you want to export to word. Abio will create your customized quote.

MS Word Template

Create a word document that looks like what you want your quote to look like. Add your logo and company branding. Maybe that’s colours and fonts that you typically use. The template for our sample company looks like this:

Save your template in the directory you’ve set up for reading templates from. When you start the process of ‘View Quote in Word’

Abio prompts you to select which MS Word document to use as a starting point. The first directory Abio looks at is the one you’ve specified for the set of books you’re operating in. To review which directory Abio is using, navigate to [d] General Ledger, then [u] Set Up, then [a] Company Entry.

The template directory is recorded in the accounts receivable section.

Save your template there, and you’ll always be able to find it easily. You can have a template for each different style of quote you produce. You may have a number of different estimators, all with their own style. Personalize a template for each estimator, if you like.

Quote Bookmark Fields

When you first create a template, it’s a static document. Adding bookmark fields allows Abio to plug in fields from your quote into your MS Word template document, and create a document that is unique for each quote.

Here’s a list of the bookmarks that Abio looks for when it’s exporting a quote to a word document:

Quote Detail Fields

These fields

Map to these bookmarks:

CheckList

This bookmark recreates the checklist in it’s entirety. In our sample template, we have a section that includes this bookmark.

When you use the ‘View Quote in Word…’ option, the customized quote section where the CheckList bookmark is looks like this.

The items you checked off on the Checklist tab are displayed. The items you didn’t check off are ignored.

SummaryTableHeader

If you are including a summary table, this bookmark includes a title for it, showing how many items are included

SummaryTable

SummaryTable puts all the cost estimate components into a single table.

Cost Estimate Components

If you want to include detailed sections on the cost estimate components, you can include up to 15 separate sections, one for each cost estimate component. If you included every field for the first cost estimate component, it would look like this:

CheckList1 – Checklist15

Recall that when you’re setting up an individual cost template, you can tie it to a category of the checklist. Say your checklist is set up with a plumbing category. If the cost estimate is for the plumbing component of the job, you can choose to include just the plumbing checklist category. Then, when you’re describing the cost estimate for the plumbing, the plumbing checklist will display with it.

Our sample MS Word template includes a bookmark for CheckList1:

And, our first cost estimate is tied to the framing category of the checklist.

So, when we export the sample quote to the above MS Word document, the document produced looks like this.

We’ve added the yellow box to highlight the way the checklist category is inserted into the document. Really it looks like this.

You can add up to 15 Cost Estimate categories this way. If you were to start with a cost estimate component that looked like this:

The following bookmarks could be used to include the fields from this component in an MS Word document.

BidOverview1 – BidOverview15

This is the bid overview field from the cost estimate component.

Item1 – Item15

This is the item number.

Title1 – Title15

This is the title of the cost estimate component.

Description1 – Description15

This is the description of the cost estimate component.

SubTable1 – SubTable15

This is all the tasks that were included in the cost estimate component.