You used to have to save a quote, close it and open the preview to find out what your customer would actually receive. Now you can watch it being written.
Open the preview pane
Open any quote or invoice on a computer and you'll see a narrow strip down the right-hand edge marked Preview. Click it and the window opens out in two.
The left half is the form you already know — client, description, line items, VAT, terms.
The right half is the document itself: your logo, your address, the customer's address, every line, the subtotal, the VAT and the total. It's the same page that goes out as a PDF and the same page they see if they open the quote online.
It redraws as you type. Change a unit price and the line total, the subtotal, the VAT and the total all move on the page in front of you. Pick a different customer and the address block changes. Add a line and it appears.
Above it, it says who's reading it — What Alistair sees.
The pane starts closed every time, so a quick price change doesn't get a full-width window it didn't need. Click the icon at the top of the pane to fold it away again — the strip comes back and you carry on.
Write the description as a paragraph
The description box holds as many lines as you want, and your line breaks come out on the customer's copy exactly as you typed them. So a boiler swap can read:
Full boiler swap at the Taynuilt property. Remove the old back boiler and fit a Worcester 4000. Includes a system flush and a 10-year warranty.
rather than being squeezed onto one line. Pressing Enter in the description makes a new line — it won't save or close the quote.
Nothing is saved until you save it
The document on the right is your draft, not the saved version. Nothing has gone anywhere and nothing has changed on the customer's copy until you press Draft or Save & + Job.
That's the point of it. The whole reason to look at the page before you save is to catch the things that only look wrong once they're laid out properly: a line that reads fine in a form box but goes over two lines on the page, a price that's a digit out, VAT you meant to set to 0%.
Opening a quote you've already saved
Clicking a quote on the Quotes list opens it showing the document, with the dates down the left. That replaces the old eye icon on the row — there's one way in now, and it lands on the thing you wanted to see.
Along the bottom:
- Edit — switch to the form. The preview folds away when you do, and the rail brings it back.
- Print — opens your printer, with the real PDF rather than a picture of it.
- Save PDF — keeps a copy.
- Share — opens your phone's share sheet, so you can send it on WhatsApp, Messages or anything else you've got. If you're on Live Quotes it sends the link to the online quote rather than a PDF — see below. On a computer with no share sheet it copies the link to your clipboard, or saves the file where there isn't one.
- Send — opens the email window, same as the Send button on the list.
What Share actually sends
If you're on Live Quotes, Share sends the link to your customer's online quote, not a PDF. That's deliberate. A PDF is a photocopy of one moment — correct a price an hour later and the copy sitting in their WhatsApp is still wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it. The link is the quote itself: it stays right, they can accept and sign on it, you can see they've opened it, and it carries on through the job to the invoice at the end.
Two exceptions, both on purpose:
- A draft shares the PDF. A quote you haven't finished has no business in front of a customer.
- No Live Quotes, no link. If the skill is switched off there's no online quote to point at, so Share does what it always did and sends the file.
Save PDF hasn't gone anywhere. If it's the file you want — for your own records, or a customer who genuinely wants an attachment — that's the button.
On a phone
The same document fills the panel, and the actions sit in a sheet along the bottom. It shows the status, the total and the one thing you most likely opened it to do — send a draft, chase an overdue invoice, record a payment on one that's waiting.
Tap the little bar at the top of that sheet and it opens out into everything else you can do with this quote: mark it accepted or rejected, create the job, raise the invoice, edit, share, print, save the PDF, or delete it. Which ones appear depends on where the quote has got to, so a draft isn't asked whether the customer accepted it.
Tap the bar again to fold it back down.
On a smaller screen
The two panes need a fair bit of width, so on a laptop with a smaller screen, a narrow window, or a phone, the quote form stays as one column exactly as it was.
You still get the document. There's an eye button at the top of the quote, next to the ✕. Tap it and the same live document opens over the form, showing everything you've typed so far. Press Esc or the ✕ on the preview to go back to the form — your work is still there.
Printing and sending
The preview inside the quote form is for looking at. There's no Print or Save PDF button on it, and that's deliberate: those give you a file of the saved quote, and what you're looking at hasn't been saved yet. You'd end up with a PDF that doesn't match what's on your screen.
Save the quote first. Then the preview from the quotes list (the eye on the row) gives you Print, Save and Send, because by then the document and the file are the same thing.
Making it look right
What's on the page comes from your workspace settings, so if something looks wrong there, that's where to fix it:
- Logo and its size — Settings → Business → Branding
- Business address, phone and email — Settings → Business → Details
- Bank details and the footer on invoices — Settings → Business → Paperwork
- Your accent colour — Settings → Business → Branding
Change any of those and the document beside your form picks them up next time you open a quote.