Fielder gives you the ability to set default values for certain fields of Estimates and Invoices, and you can specify which fields you want to show or hide on customer-facing views of Estimates and Invoices such as PDFs. This means you won't have to remember to configure these properties on every Estimate or Invoice you create. This article briefly explains how to set those defaults and how to use and optionally override them when preparing Estimates or Invoices.
To configure your organization-wide defaults, visit the Organization Details page in the Settings section.
The Organization Details page has a Preferences section where authorized users can set some organization-wide settings to control certain things such as your organization's default language, whether to allow double-booking of job assignments, and whether to automatically copy your organization's primary email address when sending out emails via Fielder. For this article, we're interested in the Default Estimate Settings and the Default Invoice Settings. Click on Default Estimate Settings to expand this section so you can view all the current options available:
As you can see, there are several things you can configure here, but you probably only need to tweak a few things. You can specify how many days your customers have to accept an estimate before it "expires", or is no longer valid. Under the Customer View Settings section, you can see there are several options for controlling what your customers will see on estimates you send to them.
This screen starts out in read-only mode. Authorized users will see an Edit button in the upper right corner of the Preferences pane. Click that button to enter edit mode.
Once in edit mode, you can make changes to any of these settings. Suppose we want to change our Days until expiration to 10, and we generally don't want to show unit prices or line totals on our estimates. We can set these as the default settings for new estimates. Making changes here will not affect existing estimates.
Now that we've made our changes, we'll click the Save button in the bottom right corner of the Preferences pane. Next we'll go create an estimate. We'll find the job and navigate to the Estimates tab, and click the Create Estimate button. Notice that the Expiration Date field has been populated with a date that is 10 days out from today's date, which happens to be September 10, 2024 at the time of writing this article. Also notice the Customer View Settings button in the upper right corner. Click on this button to see what the settings are for this estimate.
Since we set our organization-wide defaults such that the unit price and total fields are not shown, those checkboxes are unselected here. Let's add an item to this estimate, save it, and then pull up the PDF. Here's the PDF we can send to our customer. Notice that the line items do not show the unit price or total, just as we wanted:
We can override the organization-wide defaults on any particular estimate, so we have a lot of flexibility and control when we need it.
This article focused on setting defaults for estimates, but the process works the same for invoices.