What a template should hold
The parts that do not change between clients:
- The line structure. Which phases you break the work into, in what order. This is the part that took you years to get right and thirty seconds to retype badly at 6pm.
- The descriptions. How you explain discovery or two revision rounds in words that have already survived being read by a client.
- The terms. Validity period, payment days, what happens to intellectual property, how many revisions are included.
- The optional items you usually offer for that kind of job.
What must never be in a template
The price, if the price depends on the client. This sounds obvious and it is the single most common way templates cost money.
A template with €4,800 pre-filled becomes the number you quote, whether the job is two weeks or five. The pull towards the pre-filled figure is strong, and it works in exactly one direction — downward, on the jobs that should have been priced higher. Keep the structure, leave the amount empty, and let the size of the job decide it. If you need help arriving at the number, the day rate calculator starts from your costs rather than from what you charged last time.
A saved-lines library instead
Templates are for whole documents. Most of the reuse in practice is smaller: the same service line, at the same price, appearing across many different quotes.
Flowzivo keeps a library of saved lines — description, unit price, VAT rate — that you insert into any quote or invoice. The advantage over copying an old document is consistency in the direction that matters: when you raise the price of a service, you change it once, and every quote from then on carries the new figure. Copy-paste quoting means your prices are whatever the last document you happened to open said they were.
Keeping templates from going stale
Any time you change what a service costs, open the templates that mention it. Ten minutes, twice a year.
A library of twenty templates is a library nobody searches. Three or four you actually use beats twenty you scroll past.
When a client misreads a line, correct the wording in the template, not just in that quote. Otherwise the same sentence confuses the next one too.
Write the quote instead of reading about it
The demo is the real product with example data in it. No account, nothing to install, and anything you add you can keep when you sign up.
No account to look around. Example data, and anything you add is yours to keep.
Questions
How many templates do I actually need?
For most freelancers, one per kind of job — typically three or four. If you find yourself with a dozen, they are probably variations that would be better handled as saved lines inside one template.
Should the template include my terms and conditions?
Yes, and separately from the client message. Terms belong in the same place every time so a client can find them; a personalised note belongs at the top and changes every time. Mixing them means one of the two gets forgotten.
What about the validity period?
Put it in the template — typically 14 or 30 days. A quote with no expiry is a price you have promised forever, which becomes awkward the year your rates change.
Can a template include optional items?
Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to use one. The optional items for a given kind of job are usually the same, and remembering to offer them is exactly the thing that slips when you are quoting in a hurry.