My feedback on the new Sales Documents feature

Jean-Patrick HERBUTE

Dear PDTeam,

First of all, it is an absolute MUST HAVE, thank you for giving us that feature !

I've been using the feature for some weeks now, have created a dozen templates and generated tens of documents thanks to it, and I have to say I saved myself some precious time! I wanted to give you my feedback about Beta version, hoping that some of my remarks will end up on the dev team's desk

The Sales Document feature is quite powerful, as we are relatively free to do whatever we want on the templates, and the document generation is pretty fast. Moreover, everything is logged in PD and GoogleDrive, which makes the risk of loosing a document pretty low, and allows us to do some lats minute edit on the go from a phone or tablet.

However, I think some small features could be added in order to save us even more time:

• Automated calculated fields: I think that allowing us to add to the placeholder some simple mathematical operations could be interesting. For example, having a placeholder to automatically print an certain percentage of the deals value would allow us to specify some payment terms in our document.
• Widening the Person’s name placeholders : as we do have in the mail templates, having the ability to print the first name and last name separately makes sense to me.
• Widening the Addresses placeholders : as we do have in the API, having the ability to print parts of the address separately would be great (street, city, country, …)
• Allowing us to specify some format for the date fields: for the moment (at least in France), the dates are printed as “vendredi 15 septembre 2020” for example, but we rather use the DD/MM/YYYY format on generic sales documents. Having the ability to specify a format would produce more easily readable content.
• Add a document title placeholder: When documents are generated, they keep the filename of the template. Enabling the placeholder in the document name would save us quite some time and lower the risk of sending a quote entitled “Doc_rob_tpl” for example …
• Deepen the integration with the email feature within a deal: on the attach action, why not list the generated documents, and give us the possibility to attach a PDF directly generated from a Sales Document (or even a list of the uploaded files would do the trick)
• Add some conditional placeholder: the output value would be conditioned on a certain field’s value. For example, I have a field custom field “Title” on Persons, with 2 different values (M. / Mme.) that I use for email templates. When generating a document, I’d like to print “Monsieur” or “Madame” depending on the value of that “Title” field (Yes, here in France, I admit we are a bit to polite when it comes to business …) without having to duplicate my “Title” field in “Title_short” and “Title_long”

I also experienced a few little bugs using the feature, which I’m sure can be corrected as they do not cause great damage, but are more a sort of a hassle.

• In the product loop, on the product tables, on each and every item, a new blank line is generated. In the first column, the pointer comes directly at the beginning of the line, on the second column, a tabulation is added, and so on. This is quite annoying as we have to do a manual walkthrough of the generated document to correct the layout. I’d like to mention that in my templates, there are NO line break or whatsoever at the end of the placeholders.
• The replacing of the placeholders does not keep the text formatting. If I specified in my document that a certain string has to be capitalized, when replaced, it is formatted as it was in the datafield. Moreover, when replacing several lines (not rows) in a product table, each with a different text formatting, it keeps only the first line’s one and applies it to the whole cell. Therefore I lose my indentation. Yet again, this is not harmful, but forces me to spend time on going over the formatting instead of double checking and sending the document.

I think that’s all for me for the moment, thanks for reading though my feedback.

I would appreciate any other feedback here, on your usage of the Sales Documents features, on your little tweaks, and on my suggestions.

Once again, thanks PDTeam for everything, that tool is worth every cent I pay!

Jess Stacey

Hi Jean-Patrick, 

Great to hear you're getting value from the feature already! I'm one of the product managers working on this. Thank you for the rich feedback, it's really helpful and we will consider each point. I've also made a note of the bugs you're having with the product tables, we will investigate these. 

Please keep the feedback coming. 

Jess

Jean-Patrick HERBUTE

Hi Jess,

Thanks for the reply. It's so satisfying to be considered by the team!

I just discovered a new little bug on the Sales Documents feature: when I deactivate a product in the Product list on a deal (ie I uncheck it), it still shows up on the generated product table on the template. Therefor the output total price is wrong.

Anyway, thanks again!

Jess Stacey

Jean-Patrick HERBUTE said:

Hi Jess,

Thanks for the reply. It's so satisfying to be considered by the team!

I just discovered a new little bug on the Sales Documents feature: when I deactivate a product in the Product list on a deal (ie I uncheck it), it still shows up on the generated product table on the template. Therefor the output total price is wrong.

Anyway, thanks again!

Thanks for letting us know, we'll get this issue sorted! 

Jess