14. Quote Templates and Generating PDFs
Now that you’ve created your quote, you may want to generate a PDF of that quote. And so the way to do that is you can go into the quote from the related list on the opportunity and click on the link for it will bring up the detail page for that quote. And then one of the buttons here on the quote page layout is create PDF. So let’s click on that and let’s watch the magic here’s a PDF preview straight from the headquarters of Adobe. And look how nice that looks. Man, that is a good looking PDF. We will call this the redacted quote, just one big magic marker.
So either it’s an issue with my browser or it’s an issue with the preview functionality and lightning or what ifs. But I’m going to save this PDF to the quote by clicking that button. And so now we have in our related list a quote PDF listed here. So we can look at this, we could email the PDF, we could delete it or we could look at it and that is a good looking PDF. There we go. So your mileage may vary so we’ll just leave it at that. A lovely quote. And this has been derived by pulling in the data from the quote and leveraging a quote template which we’ve not set up yet. This is one of them that’s out of the box.
And so we’ve got our quote number, it’s quote number one and we’ve got the grand total here, the shipping and handling and the tax and all that and a handy place for them to sign and accept and then fax that puppy on over. Let’s close this deal. Just reverted back to the late 80s. But anyway, so we need to move on, forget about that and let’s look at quote templates now going into setup and let’s just search for template and we’ll see what sort of templates we have here in our instance. So we’ve got email templates, of course, that you may be more familiar with, but we’ve got quote templates here under Sales Quotes. Quote templates, click on that. And here is where you’ll find your standard template which you could deactivate or you could create a new one or you can edit this. So let’s go ahead and edit our quote template here.
And this is very similar to the enhanced page layout editor and you can go in and add or customize the header and the body and add additional fields if you so desire. We’re not going to do that at this point, but you can customize this and create other quote templates. You can also do a save as and create a copy and use that as a template so that you don’t destroy your standard template. And let’s just say this as copy a standard template and click Save.
For example. Other features here, quote template properties. You can change the name at that point, let’s say, oh I didn’t mean to just say copy of, but let’s say custom template or custom quote template for example, even though I’ve not changed anything. And you can get to the specific fields related to quote account opportunity, contact organization and user. And so you can pull in user information onto the quote organization information such as that infamous fax number for example, and the contact information that would be the contact that belongs to the account is related to the opportunity.
Opportunity information such as any of these fields, close dates, current generators, order number, et cetera. Account is the account information. And some of this has already been pulled in from the quote. You see the gray ones here are somewhere in the page layout. Clicking on that will show you where it actually is. Once again this is very much like the page layout editor for other page layouts in salesforce. And so click and drag and change and rearrange to your heart’s content.
And also you can wrench icon to adjust the different related lists. Here you can select and remove fields that are displayed. You can reorder. There’s a lot you can do for quote templates related to quotes. And so once you’re done, you click save. You can then activate that custom quote template and if you want that to be used then what you could do, you could either deactivate the other one or let’s go in, let’s create a new quote now and you could do this directly from the quotes tab. Actually I’m not seeing a way to create a new quote without an opportunity. So let’s go ahead and create a new quote from the same opportunity and create a second quote. So oftentimes if you’re familiar with the sales process, it’s not a one and done sort of deal. Oftentimes you’ll have to create additional follow up quotes. Now you could create a new one by clicking new quote here or you could, I believe clone one. So I’m opening up the existing quote and I don’t see a clone option here.
There may be a way to clone a quote, there probably is, but that would require some customization. Here’s a clone button for the opportunity though. So let me just go in and create a new quote real quick, or better yet, just for sake of time, let me go into the quote and let me create a new PDF. And now here’s where we can select the custom quote template or the standard template. So we’re going to select the new template that we created and created PDF that’s going to look very much the same because I made very minimal changes. But you get the idea. Now you can save to the quote related list or you can save and email the quote.
So I’m going to save that and email it. And so then that pulls up the email window for salesforce for this quote and it has the from field. Now the two field would pull in if I had a contact associated with this quote, and I don’t believe that I did. So you could specify who this is to. You can blind Carbon, copy yourself, enter a subject, and then the attachment is here. You see it as a PDF attachment and it is related to this lawn darts for the 2022 Olympics. That is the quote that this is related to. And that means that this will appear in the quote PDF related list as well. So when you’re ready to send that, just click Send. Let me go ahead and put in my own address here.
So I’ve added my little message and here’s a little branding by Salesforce. I think this has been around since probably the Y two K dilemma, but I’m going to go ahead and get rid of that. I should put send from my iPhone or something like that. Annoying, but anyway, or Mark Zuckerberg is watching you. Anyway, let me click send. All right, so attach files and send question mark. So this is just saying that it may convert this to a link depending on the size and our setting. So it’ll either send it as an attachment or it will upload to salesforce instance and give them a shareable link to where they can get to the quote online. So they click attach and send and email has been sent. So we have created now a new template for quotes in salesforce and we have saved that to our related list. So we now have multiple quotes in our quote related list and we have also emailed that quote.
15. Creating Orders that Don’t Require a Contract
So now let’s talk about contracts and orders. There’s some confusion around if you have to have a contract in order to create orders in salesforce. So I wanted to start off this lesson talking about how these work together and how you can have them work exclusively as well. Now, I’m in the All Contracts List view on the Contracts tab and I got to contracts by clicking on the App launcher and selecting Contracts not Contacts but Contracts under All Items. Let me pin the All Contracts list view so that will come up in the future. Now, I’ve not created any contracts in my and so I want to show you why you may need a contract and why you might hit a snag if you try to create an order. Now, an order is just some agreement to do business between your company and another company or customer, for example. And you can associate or add an order to an account and or a contract.
And so if we click on Orders, this brings up the Orders tab and list you have recently viewed. I’ll say All Orders and we see that we have no orders in our as well. So I’m pinning that list view as well. So we’ve got the orders listed here. Let’s try and create a new order. And you’ll notice that there’s two required there are several required fields, two of which are the contract number and the account. Now, you notice here that we can select an account. We’ve got plenty of accounts to choose from, but we do not have any contracts in our organization and there’s no ability to create a new one.
So what we can do is we can actually make this field not required so that we can create orders without requiring a contract. Now, if we previously created a contract, we could then specify it here if we wanted them to work in conjunction. The salesforce does provide you the ability to decouple these, but you’ve got to do a little bit of customization.
So let me cancel out of this. So what we need to do is edit the page layout. So now the way to do that is and we don’t have any records for this object. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to select Edit object that takes us to the object manager for the object that we’re on. And then we can select Page Layouts and there should and there is only one page layout here which we can click on to see it in action in the enhanced page layout editor and then we can make this not required. Now how to do that is to click the wrench icon and say that we don’t want this to be required. Click OK and click save. So now we’ve adjusted the page loud on the order layout. And so now if we go back in, I will just go to this tab here for All Orders and select new. And now this is no longer required. You do not see the red asterisk here. So we should be able to create an order without associating a contract. So for the order, we’re going to specify a start date.
We’re going to set a status and let’s see if I can just click save. That’s right. So I’ve got to actually start off the order and draft status. I can’t just go straight to activate it. So let me click save. So the order has been created. Now, we’ve got an order history here, and this is on the actual order detail page here. And we have a path here as well for the different status designations of either draft or activated the order history, we see that I created this. You can add notes and attachments. You’ve got the activities here on the right to be able to do events, tasks, log a call and more. But let’s get into the details here and see the order number, the order amount, and then you can specify the contract number. So we could specify an order type. I’ve not set that up or configured that. But what we need to do on the order now is we need to add products to the order. And this works much like a quote.
So we’ll add the products and we need to pull up the products from a price book. And we’re going to use the example price book. And of course, we’re going to be ordering lawn dart sets because that’s really all I’m interested in buying. So clicking next and we’ll just order one and we’ll do our unit price and list price and click save. And so now that we’ve added products to our order, let’s say we want to complete that, we can make this activated, mark that as the current status. And now we have completed that order. Now there’s a whole other range of things that need to be done in the real world. You may have to ship this, you may have to communicate with accounting and fulfillment and all sorts sorts of other systems, but at a very high level, that is how an order works. You can also have orders work in conjunction with not only accounts, but also contracts as well. So in the next lesson, we will set up contracts.
16. Adding the Orders and Contracts Related Lists to the Account Page Layout
All right, so we previously created an order, and we also made it to where it didn’t require a contract by making the contract field not required on the order page layout. Now, I did mention that you can add an order to an account and or a contract, but I wanted to show you how to add both the Orders and Contracts related list to the account page layout. If we go to the Related tab on an account, we see that we don’t have those related lists. So here’s a quick tip on how to get to the current page layout that you’re viewing right now, because we’ve got different record types on account, and so we’ve got four different page layouts here, so we can click on the Gear icon and select the Edit page. This brings up the Lightning App Builder with the page that we are currently on.
This is the name of the actual page and the page layout editor. But in order to get to it, what we need to do is close this mess out. Let’s go to the Details tab inside the preview here and click inside the Details pane somewhere. And that refreshes here on the right. And we can see that this is the actual name of the page layout. It’s called account layout, not account record page. I was thinking it was the same, but it’s not. So here’s how you get to the actual page layout for your page layout editor, and that’s the one that you’re currently on. Otherwise, it’s a real drag trying to figure out which page layout that you want to edit to see your changes. So we’re going to click on this, and that will bring up the page layout editor.
And then if we go to Related lists, what we can do is we can select and drag orders into the related lists and contracts. And so now that we’ve got those two related lists added, we’ll click Save and click yes to override any customizations of our users to include those related lists. And now we see that this account layout has just been updated. So if we go back to our other tab here from the Lightning App builder, we don’t need to make any edits here.
Okay, now that is a point of confusion. And probably worth noting is that in the Lightning App builder, you can drag standard and custom components from the left into the page here for the Lightning page. But I use this as a bridge to the page layout editor by clicking on the Details tab and then selecting this. But we’ve not made any changes to the Lightning page. We’ve made changes to the underlying page layout. So, in a way, what Salesforce does is they have their page layouts that worked in Classic, and they’re layering this or rerepresenting this with a Lightning page. And the details are something that’s pulled in from the page layout editor. And so if you wanted to rearrange how these fields appear. If you notice, like account owner and rating and account name and phone, you could go back in and actually go into the page layout editor and you would make those changes here under details scrolling down, you see account owner, rating, name, phone, et cetera.
You could drag those around, rearrange those, click save, and then you come back here and you would see that represented here once you save. But we don’t even need to save because we’ve not made any changes to the lightning page. We’ve made changes to the underlying page layout. I know that’s probably a little confusing, but thus is the life of an advanced admin in the world of lightning and classic. So I do envision someday that being combined together to where we can actually do rearrangements here, but we’re not to that point yet, so let’s click save. I didn’t actually have to click save, so I’m not going to worry about activating that, let me just go back what I should have done and just go back. So don’t worry about that. Let’s just go to our account. And the whole point of that, I kind of went deep in the weeds there, but I felt it was important to understand that, is that we’ve added the related list for contracts and orders and we’ve looked at orders and tied that to an account count, but didn’t tie it to a contract. If we want to be able to tie an order to a contract, we need to create a contract. So we will create a contract in the next lesson.
