Report and Document Templates

How to set up and customize reports and documents

Dan Fellman avatar
Written by Dan Fellman
Updated over a week ago

ContractorTools allows you to create "templates" for reports and documents. Document templates tell the program what information you want to include in the report or document, and how you want it to be formatted. The document template also allows you to set the title that appears at the top of the report or document.

You can create any number of document templates, and then you can select the template to use when you view/print/email the report or document. So each report or document can be formatted in any number of ways, and that formatting can be stored in templates that you select when you view/print/email the report or document.

Let's say for example that you want to have two versions of an estimate document; one is an "estimate" that you provide to your customer when you submit your offer to do the job, and the other is a "contract" that you have your customer sign when they agree to hire you to do the job. You may want the estimate to only show your proposed scope of work and your estimated price for that work, and you may want the contract to show your contract legalese, and provide a place for signatures.

Do to this, you can create one template for the Estimate, and another template for the Contract. The Estimate template will be set up to not include the contract terms, and the title will be set to "Estimate". The Contract template will be set up to include the contract terms, and the title will be "Contract".

To manage the estimate document templates, select a job, tap on Estimate, then tap on Document. This will display the document. Now tap on Settings in the lower left corner. This displays the document template settings menu:

The default template is "Estimate for Customer". Tap "Edit Template" to edit the settings for this template. For example, if you don't want to include the terms in the estimate document, turn off the "Terms" switch.

Now, to create another template to print a "contract" version of the document, go back to Settings, and tap Manage Templates. This shows the list of existing templates. Tap + to add a new template. Enter something like "Contract for Customer" as the template name, and enter "Contract" as the title. Then scroll down and turn the Terms setting on.

When you print or email the document, you may or may not want to include signatures. To control the appearance of signatures in the document, close the Settings menu and tap on the Signatures button in the lower right (on the iPad), or lower center (on the iPhone). This will display the signature options menu:

Check the names for which you want signatures to appear in the document, or uncheck all of the names to have no signatures appear in the document.

Did this answer your question?