Estimation Process - Best practices and/or advice?

[JoLisaSt]

Hello! My team has used Workfront for a few years as an internal/shared services marketing team. We support the business units and do not use quotes/invoices. We recently merged with another team that previously used Advantage but as of Jan 1, we are all in Workfront.

The new team has external clients and send quotes for their work. Since we are continuing with Workfront, I'm wondering if there are any "best practices" or advice someone would share about tracking quote/estimate projects within Workfront? Any current financial fields to use to enter the estimated amount or is it best to create a field within the custom form?

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

HI JoLisa,

I invite you to consider our Estimate/Invoice solution, which allows you to efficiently tailor and create a branded, auto-numbered, professional estimate and/or invoice, driving directly off a project’s planned tasks and expenses, then save it to PDF.

Regards,

Doug

[JoLisaSt]

Thanks for the response, Doug. Maybe I should have worded my question differently - I'm wondering if anyone is tracking the estimate amount in a current financial field within Workfront or if it's best to create a custom field within the project or task custom form?

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

No worries JoLisa,

As Heather recommended (and our solution also relies upon), I agree that Custom Data is likely the best approach. Good luck!

Regards,

Doug

[Heather_Kulbacki]

Hi JoLisa,

We're also an internal/shared services marketing team. But we do have our business partners review and approve any external expenses, such as printing. We have an Estimate Approval task where we enter the estimate info on a task custom form (Vendor, quantity, cost, specs, delivery info, etc). Then we have a task approval attached to that task that goes to the project sponsor to approve. So we have all the specs plus their approval all logged in Workfront.

[JoLisaSt]

Thanks, Heather! I wasn't sure if any of the standard project overview fields made since to store estimate information. I like the idea of a custom form. Do you have anything set up in the fields to track estimates that aren't approved too?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

We actually tried the standard fields within Expenses. But we wanted to set up the Task Approval within the Layout Templates in the New Home without having to go into the task for more info and since a task can have multiple expenses attached, there wasn't a way to pull in the appropriate expense's fields on Home.

So we stuck with our task custom form.

If the estimate gets rejected for whatever reason, we just add another task with the custom form and approval so we can still see on the original task what they rejected and on the new task what they ultimately approved.