The welcome guide
A proposal wins the job. The welcome guide is what your client gets after they say yes: who they'll work with, how the job will run, and what to do before day one. It has no prices and nothing to sign.
Start a welcome guide
Open the project
Open the job’s project, click New document, and choose the Welcome guide tab.
Choose how to start
Start from scratch gives you our starter guide, already written. Once you’ve saved your own, this says Start from your template. You can also Copy a past document to start from a guide you made for another client. Click Make the welcome guide.
Make it right for this job
The starter is written so you can send most of it as it is. Read it once and change anything that doesn’t sound like you. Some things fill in on their own: the address, a line about the job in the opening letter, and your team from the Company page, with their phone numbers and emails. Those only print in a welcome guide, never in a proposal.
Anything grey is still to be written for this job, like the plan or who files the permits. It won’t print until you write it. To print it as it is, open its ⋯ menu and choose Print the sample text as is.
Check it and send it
The same check and the same link as a proposal. A new guide usually has a few grey parts left, and the check lists them. See The check before sending.
Passages that belong to one job
Most of a guide says the same thing to every client. A few passages don’t, like the floor plan or who to call at the permit office. Mark those so they don’t get copied into the next client’s guide by mistake.
- 1Open the passage’s ⋯ menu and choose this.
Nothing changes in the guide you’re working on. But the next time it’s copied for another job or saved as a template, that passage comes back grey with the old words still in it. It won’t print until you rewrite it or keep it, and the check before sending names it.
The starter guide already has these passages marked. To remove a mark, open the same menu and choose Reuse this as written. The mark works the same way in proposals.
Make it your template
When a guide reads the way you want every guide to read, open it from its project and click More then Save as a template. Tick Use it for new welcome guides and click Save template. Every new guide starts from it. The client’s name, address and date are left out, and the passages you marked come back grey.