Adding or Editing Document Templates

Adding or Editing Document Templates

When a proposal is complete, and if necessary, approved, you can use Mobileforce CPQ to create proposal documents to be sent to the customer. These documents formalize agreement between you (the seller) and your customer (the buyer) listing the products or services being provided for a specified payment amount. Mobileforce CPQ creates proposal documentation based on the selected document template. For more information about document generation, see Creating Proposal Documents.

Mobileforce provides sample documentation templates that reference sample files that have been preloaded to your Mobileforce CPQ application.

Admin users will typically edit these sample templates to suit their business needs, geographic region, the products being sold, the terms of sale, and the terms and conditions required for your business. Additionally, users can choose to create their own document templates from scratch.

Note:

Mobileforce recommends that you make copies of the sample documentation templates before editing them, so you have templates that create valid proposal documents.

You can create multiple document templates that include or exclude the sections that are required for your proposal documents, including quote line items, signatures, and additional document pages you want to add. If you have organization-specific documentation to include in the template, you will want to upload that as a unique file. For more information, see Uploading Files.

Mobileforce CPQ generates a high-quality quote PDF document using one or more source template documents – typically Microsoft Word or Excel documents. These source template documents typically contain a proposal boilerplate, marketing information, customer testimonials and legal terms and conditions. The source documents can also have OpenTBS macros embedded: these macros map to information (form) fields contained in the quote instance. These form fields have unique names that can be referenced in the template documents. These field names are all defined in the Quote UI Layout.

For details and the specific syntax of OpenTBS macros, please see Forms Expressions.

OpenTBS inserts values into spreadsheets as strings by default. If you want it to insert it as a different type, you must specify the type in the macro.

Creating and editing document templates

A document template is essentially a consolidated source template that the CPQ system uses to generate the output quote or proposal document. A document template can encapsulate multiple template files that you can upload.

Click the Document Templates link from the CPQ Admin page. Then, from the Document Templates page, click + Add. Additionally, you can click the button to edit an existing template.

When you save the template, MobileForce CPQ automatically populates the metadata values (such as Created Time) for the template.

The Document Template page includes the additional sections:

Here is a complete document template:

Access Control options

Specify the following options:

Active: Specify whether the template is currently active. By default, the setting is set to Yes. To deactivate the template, the setting should be set to No.

ACL: The Access Control List (ACL) allows you to specify the CRM roles that are allowed to create a document using the template.

Click the roles field and select one or more roles from the list.

Effective Date Click the field to select the date after which users can create a document using the template.

Expiration Date Click the field to select the date after which users can no longer create a document using the template.

General Restrictions options

Specify the following options to restrict access to the template:

For more information about creating expressions in MobileForce CRM, see the MobileForce Expressions documentation.

Generated Document options

Specify options for generating the proposal document from the template:

Generated File Format:

Format of the target document generated from this template. Can be one of the following:

docx: A MS Word document. Templates using this format can only have one section. Additionally, that section's template file must be a MS Word document.

xlsx: A MS Excel document. Templates using this format can only have one section. Additionally, that section's template file must be a MS Excel document.

pdf: A PDF document. Templates using this format can have one or more sections.

Generated Filename:

File name of the generated document. You can use macro variables in the ‘Generated Filename’ field to create unique filenames (for example, by using a date expression). The macro variable syntax is the same as the syntax used for email templates, i.e., (‘{DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), ‘Mj'}_${customer_name}_proposal.pdf” would generate ‘Apr1_Spacely Sprockets_proposal.pdf' if it was invoked on April 1st, and the customer name was Spacely Sprockets. Note also that in order to ensure that previously created files aren't accidentally overwritten, the quote will still automatically append a ‘ (num)’ to the end of the filename if there is already a file with the same name.

Generated File ACL: Access Control List (ACL) for the generated document. Users that are authorized by this ACL can view the generated document. Note that this is different than the acl field for this object, which identifies which users can generate the document.

Generated File Hidden Condition: An optional rule expression which will determine if the generated document will be visible to the user.

A note about Date and Time (and TimeZone)

Add the following props to an App's ADL to display its date in the specified display format.

    <prop key="cpq-date-displayformat">d-m-Y</prop>
    <prop key="cpq-datetime-displayformat">d-m-Y H:i:s</prop>

To specify a timezone for a MobileForce account, add these two inputs to the ‘settings’ element in the ADL:

<input label="Time Zone (EasyCLM)" type="picklist" listitems="Europe/Rome|Europe/Rome" max="" name="easyclm-timezone" value="Europe/Rome"/>
<input label="Time Zone" type="picklist" listitems="Europe/Rome|Europe/Rome" name="timezone" value="Europe/Rome"/>

In order to allow your application to use a specific timezone, you will want to change the picklist listitems and default values to the desired time zones. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones).

Note that if you instead want the app to have only one timezone that users cannot change, you can instead set the ‘timezone’ and ‘easyclm-timezone’ ADL properties.

Signature options

If you require a digital or third party signature, ensure that Enable Signature is set to Yes, and then click the System drop-down list to select the method used to acquire digital signatures ( DocuSign, PandaDoc, or Adobe Sign).

Once the system is selected, you must enter the authentication information for that system. See the applicable signature documentation for more information.

Document Sections

MobileForce CRM allows you to add custom sections from your local system to your document (for example, a limited warranty or NDA). To add a section, click the Add Section button.

Note:

MobileForce includes several sample document sections when installed.

From this page you will specify the following options, and then click Create when finished:

Note:

Documents must be uploaded to MobileForce CRM from the Uploaded Files page to appear in the Source File Name menu. For more information, see Uploading Files.

Example:

If creating a template where the Non Disclosure Agreement is to appear before the Limited Warranty, you would set the Order for the NDA at a lower number (e.g., 50) than the number for the warranty (e.g., 100).

Different sections in the document template indicate the order in which they appear, and whether they are optional or not. Furthermore, each section has an associated filename, which describes the file from which the section is generated. Different sections can use different files. Document template sections have the following required fields:

Name: Displayed name for this section.

Order: Order of this section within the parent document template. Sections within a document template are ordered by this field in ascending order.

SourceFilename: Name of the template file to use to generate this section. This file must be either a MS Word file, a MS Excel file, or a PDF file. If this is a MS Word or Excel file, it can include macro expressions.

In addition, the following optional fields are supported in a document template section:

Hidden Condition: An optional rule expression which determines whether this section should be hidden from the user. Hidden sections will never be included in the generated document.

Optional: Boolean value indicating whether the user is allowed to exclude this section from the document on document generation.

Additional Options:

Note:

Since the document template is often a word document, it sometimes has bounding box objects (box) that might restrict the size of the text inside it. If you use macros in document templates that expand to text, if the text overflows this bounding box, the text will be clipped.