Salesforce quoting was initially released in Winter ’10.  However, in this release, the quote template was non-alterable.  The Spring ’11 release provided a beta version of a quote template editor.  In the Winter ’11 release, Quote Templates became generally available to users of Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

In the move from the beta release of Quote Templates to general availability, two important features were added.

First, headers and footers can now be added to Salesforce quoting templates.

Second, a text/image field can now be added to templates.  This allows both for adding graphics, such as a company logo, and for adding specialized text such as Terms & Conditions or a custom signature block (the default signature block can now be suppressed).

A handy feature of Quote Templates is that if there are any fields in a template that don’t contain data (such as Tax or Shipping) on a given Quote record, these fields will be automatically suppressed in the quote output.

Salesforce allows users to create one or more quotes per opportunity.  Quotes can be previewed as PDF files within Salesforce (with some OS/browser dependencies) and can also be emailed directly from within Salesforce.

Salesforce Quoting Video

Here’s a video that shows a simple case of adding a quote to an opportunity, selecting line items, previewing the PDF output from a template and then emailing the quote to a customer or prospect:

Possible Improvements to Salesforce Quoting Templates

Currently, Salesforce quotation templates do not provide any page break control.  It would be good to be able to add a page break before or after a specific section.  This way, Terms & Conditions could start on a new page, for example.

Also, any Product fields that don’t roll up to the Quote record are not available in the Quote Template editor.  For example, if a Product has a multi-line description and that description should be displayed in the Quote output, there’s no easy way to include that description field (a Text Area field) in the a quote template, out of the box.

Next, there’s no font control in the text/image field. In the graphic above and in the video, the word “Quotation” on the PDF was added as an image.

An Alternative to Using Quote Templates

On Enterprise and Unlimited editions, a programmatic workaround to any “show-stopper” limitations of Quote Templates is to create fully customized quote templates using Visualforce.  The standard PDF quote generation can then be overridden with Visualforce to PDF.  To discuss custom quote template creation, please contact us.