Estimates

Estimates are documents which denote the approximate cost of products or services you sell.

Understanding Estimates

Estimate, literally means an approximation or a rough calculation of the value of a product or service. Estimation is the process of evaluating the value of something. Likewise, in your business, estimate is a document that you give to your customers with an estimate of the value of the product or service that you’re selling to them. Let’s look at Mark’s business to better understand Estimates.

Scenario: Mark runs a construction firm and takes up a project to construct a house for one of his customers. Firstly, he creates an estimate for the project which is an approximation of all the costs involved to complete the construction. Mark sends the estimate to his customer to negotiate on the estimated price. The final amount that his customer has to pay can more or lesser than the estimated amount.

Similarly, you can create an estimate for the products or services that your customers have ordered from you to negotiate the price with your customers. As soon as your customers agree on the price, they can accept the estimate in the Customer Portal or, you mark the estimate as accepted manually and convert it to an invoice. The following diagram will help you understand how Estimates work in Zoho Invoice.

Life Cycle of an Estimate

Pro Tip: It’s not mandatory to create an estimate If you sell your products or services with fixed prices to your customers. You can directly create an invoice and receive payments.

Create & Send Estimates

Creating a New Estimate Send your customers a quick estimate for the product/service you offer. Here’s a guide to creating a new estimate in Zoho Invoice.
Customizing Estimates Email estimates to your clients, or send it to them via post. Here’s how you do it.
Editing Estimates
If you’re renegotiating with your client and need to make changes to your estimates, use the edit option.

Estimate Preferences

Configuring Estimate Preferences
Configure your estimate preferences to automate, mention Terms & Conditions and create custom fields.

Managing your Estimate

Attaching Files to your Estimate Attach bills, documents, sample files, product photos..anything that needs to accompany your estimates when they’re sent out.
Download, Print and Delete your Estimate See how you can print your estimates, export them as PDF or even delete them altogether.

Estimate Actions

Accepting an Estimate Learn how your customers can accept an estimate via customer portal (or) to manually update the estimate when your customer acknowledges.
Converting your Estimate into an Invoice Just when your customer is happy with your quote, convert the estimate into an invoice and bill them for the product/service you offer.
Creating Projects from Estimates Learn how to create projects from your estimates.
Cloning your Estimate Create a duplicate of the estimate you had created previously in Zoho Invoice.

Customizing your Estimates

Customizing Estimates
Customize your estimate templates and make them represent your business.
Automatically Convert Estimate to Invoice You can automate to convert the accepted estimates automatically into an invoice. Here’s how.
Adding Custom Fields Need for extra fields for your estimates? Here’s how you can add them.