We\' are a sales company that produces quite personalised sales proposals for ou

Question

We' are a sales company that produces quite personalised sales proposals for our potential customers. A lot of shared/generic information is used within these proposals, but a lot of information is built from data that is unique to each customer.

At the minute, we use Apple's Numbers app (we're all on Apple hardware), to tabulate and calculate specific (lighting/electrical) cost data. We then manually take the results from certain fields and then drop them into a Pages document. We add our potential customer's logo to the cover and then print to PDF. Once we have a PDF open in Preview, we 'drag-in' the generic content from other PDFs, before saving as a final document to present.

'Building' a proposal is taking a lot of time and I am looking for a bit of software, both on or offline (but needs to work with Apple) that could help us achieve these kind of things.

I have looked at some online offerings, but they seem to be based around design agencies and I can't picture them being useful for our requirements.

This is what I would like to enter in to the front-end:

Enter specific information such as cost per kWh, cost of installation etc.
Have text areas where I could enter text such as "This is what I think you want us to do

Explanation / Answer

I would suggest making either a form using or database product like LibreBase or a mail merge using your word processor software like LibreOffice for MAC if you don't have one with this feature. You have a standard template and a second data source and use substitution. You will have to add a bunch of custom fields to suite your needs.

LibreOffice uses <Item> notation. For example <ElectCost> would be used a substitute for the cost of electricity. <CustomerDescription> for that need.

You may need to link LibreCalc (spreadsheet) to do the math calculations. You can Export to PDF directly from LibreWriter. The only issue I see is "Choose products and add them to the proposal" You can add all the products to a single field and have them appear. However, someone else may know a better way.

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