Pricing Tables, Automated: The Smart Way to Present Your Pricing

There's a lot of pressure around getting your proposal pricing section just right. It's the one part of your proposal that has the power to make or break a deal. According to our data, it's also the section clients spend the most time looking at.

Knowing this, you want to make sure your pricing section is perfect. You go through your products and services spreadsheet, carefully pasting line items and their prices into a table. You decide to sprinkle in some formatting, maybe putting the product name in bold so it's visually different from the description.

Then, you break out the calculator or an Excel formula to calculate the total. Getting this wrong would be pretty embarrassing, so you double and triple check just in case. Right as you're ready to send, you remember you forgot to add taxes, so now you have to go back and recalculate.

By the time you finally press send, you've already spent 30 minutes to an hour finishing only one section of your proposal. Yikes.

It doesn't have to be this way

While your pricing section should be spot on, the process of getting there shouldn't take more than a few minutes of your time. With Better Proposals, every pricing table you create looks professional and comes without the hassle of manual formatting or calculations.

What's more, our pricing tables make it easier to upsell, and they're easy to set up for package selling and subscriptions. There's a lot more you can do with our pricing tables, so let's start from the top.

1) Adding a pricing table

To add a pricing table to your proposal, click on the plus icon between blocks. Then, choose Pricing block.

Once you've added the Pricing block, you can start populating your pricing table with line items, add a section title, or apply a discount.

We'll cover section titles and discounts a bit later. For now, let's click on Line item. You can add line items in two different ways: using the dropdown to choose between products and services you've set up in your database or adding them from scratch.

Once you've added a line item, you can add more by clicking on the plus icon inside the pricing table. All the line item names, descriptions, pricing, and the frequency you charge for them are automatically pulled from your Better Proposals database.

In addition to that, all the totals are automatically calculated and displayed under the pricing table.

Setting up your products and services database

To make your products and services easy to add into pricing tables, you can set up a pricing database. Click on the gear icon in the left sidebar and navigate to Products and Services under Admin.

To add a new product or service, click on Create New Product in the top right corner. You can also edit, duplicate, or archive all the products and services you've already listed.

When you're adding a new product or service, you'll be able to give it a name, a description, a code, and set its price. In addition to that, you can also:

• Choose how you charge for it (one-off, monthly, quarterly, annually)
• Set whether you charge an amount or percentage for it
• Mark it as automatically optional
• Mark it as automatically a choice item
• Mark it as tax exempt

Each time you add a line item from your database, the pricing table will automatically pull in all the settings you've assigned to the product or service.

Adding section titles

Section titles are a great way to separate pricing table items. Aside from making your pricing table more organized, they're also a great way to plug add-ons into the same pricing table.

For example, if you're sending an SEO services proposal, you can use a section title to separate core services from optional ones. That way, you're giving your client a recommendation that they can (but don't have to) listen to.

Visually separating the core services from optional items gives your client peace of mind that you won't charge them for anything they didn't check off.

2) Optional items

With Better Proposals pricing tables, you can offer clients optional items without having to go back and forth via email. Simply put your add-ons into the pricing table, then mark them as optional items.

When you add an optional item to your pricing table, you have two different options in terms of how it's displayed for your client. They can either opt in or opt out, depending on how you set up the checkbox.

To have the client opt in, simply leave the checkbox blank before sending. It will display as a blank box for your client as well.

Alternatively, if you want clients to opt out of the items they don't want, click on the checkbox inside the document editor before sending. When your client opens the proposal, the box will already be marked in green and they'll need to uncheck any add-ons they don't need.

3) Choice items

If you're selling service or product packages, you'll love the fact that you can use choice items in our pricing tables. If you've set up your packages as choice items in the database, all you need to do is add them to a pricing table as line items.

Alternatively, you can set any line item inside a pricing table to be a choice. If you want your client to choose between several options, click on the gear icon next to the line items you want them to choose from.

A sidebar will appear to the right. Check off the box that says Make this a choice.

Once you've done that, a Select button will appear next to all the line items you've set up as choices. Another thing you can do is make sure your client doesn't accidentally accept your proposal without choosing one of the items. To do that, navigate to the gear icon in the top right corner of the pricing table.

Once you've clicked on it, a sidebar will appear to the right. Check off the box under Force a choice.

If your client tries to accept your proposal without having chosen an item, they'll be prompted to choose one of the options before proceeding. That way, you don't have to awkwardly reach back out to find out which one of your packages they were saying yes to.

4) Quantities

Besides options and choices, you can also use Better Proposals pricing tables to let clients choose quantities. To enable quantities on a line item, navigate to the gear icon next to the line item you want to set quantities up for. In the sidebar, check off Show quantities.

If you only want to display a quantity of a product a client has ordered for transparency, you can hit Save and adjust the quantity before sending. However, if you want your client to be able to choose a quantity, check that option off as well.

When letting clients choose a quantity of a line item, we recommend also setting the maximum. This helps with avoiding a higher volume of orders than you can manage.

When you let a client choose a quantity, they'll be able to add or remove products by clicking on plus and minus icons inside the pricing table. The pricing table will display the pricing of a single item, the total for a single item based on the quantity chosen, and a grand total for all items at the bottom.

5) Adding multiple pricing tables

While you have the option to separate products and services by add section titles to a pricing table, sometimes it just looks messy. As a rule of thumb, your client should be able to see the items and the pricing in a glance.

If you have too many line items in one pricing table, meaning your client needs to scroll to get to the total, it might be a good idea to separate them. A great way of doing this is by using multiple pricing tables.

For example, if you do wedding photography, you'll first want your client to choose a service package. Then, you'll also want to know how many physical copies they need and how many photobooks they want.

Putting all this in one pricing table, especially if you're letting them choose their own quantities, can be overwhelming. Instead, you can create one pricing table for service packages and another for print materials.

6) Applying discounts

If you think the worst part about applying a discount is having to do the math (same), we have great news for you. Besides automatically calculating your totals and taxes, our pricing tables also take care of applying your discounts.

All you have to do is navigate to the line item settings and check off Add a discount. You can choose to discount an amount or a percentage of the total, and the pricing table will do the math for you.

Once you've applied a discount, the pricing table will display the initial price of the line item, the percentage or amount that was discounted, and the final price after the discount.

One last thing

How do you feel about going back to your static, manual pricing tables after seeing what Better Proposals can do? To save yourself a lot of time and hassle, sign up today and at least try us out. The first 14 days are free.