Solutions for Customizing your Salesforce Quote PDF

April 1, 2022

Your quoting process is essential to closing business. When it’s time to make the deal, you want to configure your quote and make things clear for your prospect. In a perfect world, the quote you download from Salesforce would look right, contain the right information, and would be easy to access. Unfortunately, the default way Salesforce quotes get exported from the system can be less than ideal, and can impede your sales process.

Limitations of Salesforce’s PDF quote template

If you regularly utilize the quoting feature in Salesforce, you may have run up against a few frustrations when downloading the quote. Do any of these sound familiar?

You’d like the downloaded PDF quote to match your company branding, but you can’t customize the fonts and colors.
You’d like to export the Salesforce quote to Microsoft Word or Excel instead of a PDF, but that’s not an option.
Fields with a blank value don’t show up when you export the quote.
You can only generate a PDF quote from the Quote record in Salesforce, but you’d love to create it directly from the opportunity page, reducing the number of clicks.
You would like a complex discount calculation to be included but the settings aren’t quite making sense.
You’d like the product descriptions to be added to the quote that you download, but they won’t show up.
Global concerns like right-to-left text are not supported.

Salesforce’s default functionality for generating quotes is pretty limited. What options are available to you for customizing your quotes?

Customizing your Salesforce Quote Template and Process

Finding a solution to the problems you’re having with Salesforce quotes can be tricky. Do you just need a different template? Are there things that are possible within the robust system somewhere you haven’t found? The way we see it, you have two primary options: 1. Purchase a third-party app through Salesforce’s Appexchange that adds functionality or 2. Have someone develop custom functionality that targets your specific problems, staying within your current use of Salesforce.

A robust solution: Purchase a third-party app

Salesforce’s Appexchange has several options that can help with these issues and more. Here are some pros and cons for you:

Pros:

No matter what version of Salesforce you have, there will be a solution available.
The solutions are well-vetted by Salesforce and you can check out reviews and testimonials.
Most of the solutions that will work for your quoting woes also have additional features that you may find helpful

Cons:

Their solutions are still not fully customizable. You are still confined to the templates that they provide.
These apps can really get expensive, and often require an annual cost as well as hidden fees.
Sometimes, you’ll need someone with robust expertise in-house to implement the app and the functions it provides.
We’ve heard complaints that some solutions are “clunky” and take a long time to load or download.

Some of the apps that we would recommend would be: S-docs, Conga, and Apsona. These solutions may work well for the issues you’re experiencing with quote downloads.

A targeted, practical solution: Get custom functionality

Alternatively, you can work with a company (or developer) who can create a fully customized, practical solution for you within your budget. This often means leveraging available tools already within Salesforce and solving exactly the issues you’re dealing with. We’ve laid out some pros and cons of this approach for you as well:

Pros:

Save money! You pay a one-time project cost, which can save you a lot of money. You’re already paying plenty annually for Salesforce, you don’t want to add more to that!
Feel heard – Work with a person who has actual business experience to help explain the solution to you, set it up for you, and help make changes later if needed.
Get solutions faster – The project can be a faster process then setting up a whole new app.
Smaller scale, targeted fixes – If you don’t want to reinvent the whole wheel, then you can just fix the parts that are giving you trouble. Your exact needs are addressed in a customized set up.
Some companies will allow your company to own the documentation and the fix moving forward.

Cons:

This will likely only work if you have the Enterprise version or higher of Salesforce
Some developers that offer this will either protect their code or will not give you ownership of the solution. If you need edits down the road, they’re the only people that can modify it.

As you might have guessed, we at Kiwi Group can work with you to address your quoting issues with a practical, targeted solution.

Kiwi Group’s custom quote template and custom quote process for Salesforce

In the past, we have worked with clients to build practical custom solutions for their quoting frustrations.

It is very important to us to listen to exactly what needs our clients have, and develop a solution that will make their lives easier. We care about helping you fix your problem as fast as possible.

We always transfer ownership of any work we do to our clients so you don’t have to worry about issues down the road. In fact, our goal is to make the code in our solutions easily transferable to another developer.

Here are some of the areas we’ve addressed:

If you’re frustrated with the quotes you can download from Salesforce, we can help. Contact us to discuss.