- What a Project order is
- Create the order
- Set up your rooms on the Discover tab
- Upload drawings on the Design tab
- Build the proposal
- How rooms stay in sync
- Save as you go
- What happens next
What a Project order is
Catalog orders assume you already know what you're selling - the customer picks products, the price calculates, and off it goes. A lot of your work doesn't start that way. A homeowner walks in with a Pinterest board and a vague idea about their kitchen, and it's weeks before anyone talks about line items.
That's what Project orders are for. You can open a job, name the rooms, drop in inspiration images and drawings, and leave pricing completely alone until you're ready to quote it.
A Project order has five tabs:
- Discover — rooms, room-level settings, and inspiration files
- Design — your drawings and design files
- Proposal — the line items that become the price
- Purchasing — what you need to buy or outsource for the job
- Order Documents — your output pages (proposal, invoice, agreement, whatever you've set up), plus the Results tab
This article covers getting a project started and quoted, the first three tabs.
Create the order
We kept order creation deliberately short. Nothing slows a new job down like a form asking for a ship date before anyone's decided on a countertop.
When you create a new Project order, you'll only be asked for:
- Order name: what you'll recognize the job by
- Company and contact: who the project is for
- Any required custom fields: your instance uses (a PO number, for example)
Everything else fills in behind the scenes. The order starts in Bid status, and billing address, shipping address, and shipping method all default from that company's settings. If a company doesn't have those defaults saved yet, you'll see those sections appear so you can fill them in.
Start with just the essentials, everything else can be adjusted later.
None of this is locked in. Once the order is saved, every defaulted field is right there in the sidebar and editable. Ship date, install date, description, addresses - change them whenever the job calls for it.
Set up your rooms on the Discover tab
Projects get organized by space, because that's how your customer thinks about them. They're not buying 34 doors, they're doing the kitchen, the primary bath, and a mudroom if the budget holds.
On the Discover tab you'll build out those spaces as Rooms. New rooms are named "Room 1," "Room 2," and so on, and you can rename them to whatever makes sense... Kitchen, Master Bath, Laundry.
Each room holds its own settings, so a finish choice on the kitchen doesn't have to apply to the whole job.
Add a room for each space in the project and name it something you'll recognize.
You can also upload files to each room here. This is the spot for the early-stage stuff - the screenshots, the Pinterest saves, the photo the customer took of their neighbor's island. Keeping inspiration attached to the room it belongs to means nobody's digging through email six weeks later trying to remember which bathroom the tile was for.
Upload drawings on the Design tab
Once you're past inspiration and into actual design work, the Design tab is where those files live.
It takes any file type. Your most recent upload lands at the top of the list and opens automatically, so the newest version of a drawing is what you see when you walk in. Click any file in the list to preview it, and delete anything that's been superseded.
Your latest upload opens automatically; click any file in the list to preview it.
A small habit worth building: name files so the version is obvious. The list shows the file name above the preview, and future-you will be grateful.
Build the proposal
The Proposal tab is where the job gets its price. Since there's no catalog doing the math for you, you're writing the lines yourself — which is exactly what you want on a project where half of it is custom anyway.
Add a row for each thing you're quoting, then fill in:
- Qty - how many
- Description - what the customer is paying for, in their language
- Rate - the price per unit
- Amount - calculated for you (Qty × Rate)
- Export Class - Allows categorization when the info syncs with your accounting software
- Tax exempt - check it on any line that shouldn't be taxed
Lines are organized under the same rooms you set up on Discover, so the proposal reads the way the project actually runs.
Line items sit under the room they belong to, so the proposal reads room by room.
Take your time here. You do not have to add a single proposal line to save the order. That's on purpose, get the files uploaded and the rooms named during discovery, and come back to pricing when the customer has actually decided something.
The one thing to know: an empty proposal means the order stays in Bid. You can't move it to Authorized or beyond without at least one line, because there'd be nothing to price the job or build an invoice from. More on that in the statuses article.
How rooms stay in sync
Rooms are shared between the Discover tab and the Proposal tab. Add, rename, or delete a room on either one, hit save, and the other tab reflects the change.
So if you rename "Room 2" to "Guest Bath" on Discover, the Proposal tab shows Guest Bath too. Same list, two views of it. You never have to maintain rooms twice.
Save as you go
Here's a real difference from catalog orders, and it's worth calling out: on a Project order, all three tabs are available immediately — before you've saved anything.
On a catalog order you only see the order page until you save. On a Project order you can start on whichever tab matches the conversation you just had. Uploading drawings first? Go to Design. Customer already gave you a number? Start on Proposal.
Each tab has its own save button. Save your work on the tab you're on, without bouncing to another tab to do it.
What happens next
Once the proposal has real lines in it and the customer is on board, the job starts moving through its statuses — Authorized, Confirmed, In Production, and on to Installed.
Project orders use a different status ladder than catalog orders, and a few things (like when revenue is recognized) work differently as a result. That's covered in the Project order statuses article.