In this article, you will learn how automations may or may not affect estimates that are part of a sales proposal. 

Workiz automations make it easy to follow up with clients based on the status of their estimates — whether they’ve been sent, approved, or declined. However, when estimates are part of a sales proposal, automations behave a little differently to make sure they only trigger when it makes sense.

A sales proposal contains multiple estimates, but your client ultimately approves only one. Because of that, Workiz is designed to honor the proposal’s context and avoid sending unnecessary or confusing messages.

How automation rules apply to proposal estimates

If you have an automation rule that says, “Send a reminder if an estimate is sent (but not approved),” it will behave differently depending on how the estimates were created and approved:

• When the client approves and estimate through the client portal
  Workiz automatically updates the remaining estimates in the proposal to declined. Once that happens, automations that target “sent but not approved” or “declined” estimates will not be sent — since the proposal has already been resolved.
• When your team manually approves an estimate in Workiz
  The remaining estimates are not automatically updated to declined. Because of this, any other estimates in the proposal may still match automation rules (for example, “sent but not approved”) and trigger follow-ups you didn’t intend.

If you’re approving estimates manually from the Workiz dashboard, make sure to update the status of the remaining estimates in the proposal to declined. This ensures that your automations reflect the correct context and no unnecessary messages are sent to your clients.

Declined estimate automations

If you have automations designed to send messages for declined estimates, Workiz also takes proposal context into account. When a client approves one of the estimates in a proposal, the remaining declined estimates will not trigger those automations.