The flow at a glance
The six tabs, in the order they appear:
- Information — who the customer is and what this project is about.
- Drawing — sketch the work area, layer by layer, and attach products as you go.
- Options — turn the drawing into a priced proposal with comparable choices.
- Resources — surface your company's credibility and product detail when the customer needs to see it.
- Details — describe the work precisely with specifications and wills.
- Summary — review, capture signatures, log the deposit, share the documents.
After Summary, a separate Finish the appointment action records the outcome of the visit and closes out the paperwork.
Why this order
The order is the appointment, not just the app. Think of it as three acts:
- Act 1 — Discover (Information, Drawing). Before you can sell anything, you need to understand who the customer is, what they want, and the physical shape of the work. Information confirms the customer; Drawing turns the site into something everyone in the conversation can point at.
- Act 2 — Propose (Options, Resources). Once you understand the work, you can price it. Options builds two priced choices the customer can compare at a time. Resources gives you everything you need to back those prices up — your company's history, your product detail, your warranty story — at the moment the customer asks "why this much?"
- Act 3 — Close (Details, Summary, Finish). Once the customer's chosen what they want, Details locks the precise scope (specifications, customer wills, contractor wills) so the contract is accurate. Summary is where the customer signs, the deposit is logged, and the documents are shared. Finish captures the outcome of the appointment.
Acts 1 and 2 are the sales conversation. Act 3 is the commitment and the wrap-up. The order keeps the sales conversation from getting interrupted by precision-of-scope work the customer doesn't care about — that's why Details comes after Options, not before.
Information
What it's for. The cover sheet of the job. Information has two sub-tabs: Customer Information (verify the customer's email, phone, address, who's signing, which addresses are on this contract) and Appointment Information (walk through your meeting plan and answer the customer interview questions for this project).
What the rep is doing. Confirming who they're talking to and gathering the context the rest of the appointment depends on. The meeting plan keeps the conversation on a consistent script across reps; the interview questions capture the answers that the install crew will need later.
The on-the-fly customer edit case. A common scenario: the appointment is booked under the husband's name, but the rep shows up and ends up selling to the wife. From Customer Information, the rep can add the wife as a person on the customer account, mark her as the signer for this contract, and the husband stays on the account untouched. Or if both partners are at the kitchen table, both can be signers — every person flagged as a signer gets their own signature line on the contract. The customer account is editable mid-appointment; nothing in the customer record gets overwritten just because the person in front of you isn't the one who booked.
What carries downstream. Everything. The customer's name, address, and contact info appear on the contract. The interview answers and the completed meeting plan appear on the job-information sheet so the install crew arrives already knowing the context.
Drawing
What it's for. A visual representation of the work area. Drawing is layered — each layer can hold shapes, an attached product, measurements, and notes — and the canvas renders on every downstream document. The toolbar offers shape tools (Arrow, Line, Polygon, Rectangle, Triangle, Circle, Scribble), a Text tool for typed labels, a Selection tool for editing existing shapes, an Eraser, and Pan for navigation.
What the rep is doing. Sketching the work area in front of the customer. Adding layers for each part of the job, attaching products to them as the conversation reveals what the customer wants. The drawing's job is to communicate; it's illustrative, not measured — measurements that drive pricing are entered on each layer separately.
What carries downstream. The drawing itself, attached to the contract, proposal, and job-information sheet. Customers see what they're buying; install crews see what they're building.
Options
What it's for. Turning the drawing and the attached products into a price. Each option is a complete priced proposal — a set of layers, products, discounts, financing, and minimums that totals to a number.
The Photoshop-style layer-toggle feature. The standout feature of Options is that each option carries a column of layer checkboxes in the sidebar. Tick a layer on or off and two things update simultaneously: the price on the option card recalculates with that layer's products included or excluded, and the drawing on the canvas redraws to reflect the same change. It's like Photoshop's layer panel — toggle a layer's visibility and the canvas updates — except when a layer is on, it's priced. That makes "what if we add this", "what if we drop that", and "what if we swap this out for that" a real-time, interactive conversation with the customer instead of a price-list lookup.
The two-at-a-time sales tactic. Bidvio lets you build as many options as you want, but only ever compares two at a time. That's deliberate. The goal of a sales appointment isn't to give the customer a menu — it's to walk them out of the appointment thinking yes or no, not this, or that, or that, or maybe? Decision fatigue is the enemy of a same-day close. So the rep narrows the choice to two on screen, lets the customer pick a winner, and then — if needed — swaps the losing option out for a third or fourth alternative without the customer ever having to hold more than two in their head at once. If the customer wants three written proposals to take home, the rep can produce them on the fly by swapping the chosen option through several alternatives, but the live conversation never has more than two in view.
What the rep is doing. Building the right options for this customer. Toggling layers on and off mid-conversation to reshape both the price and the drawing in front of the customer. Applying discounts and financing where they fit. Narrowing the choice down to two.
What carries downstream. The picked option becomes the contract. Its line items, totals, discounts, and financing terms all appear on the document the customer signs.
Resources
What it's for. A library of supporting material the rep can show the customer mid-appointment. The tab has two columns: Company resources (your portfolio, certifications, warranty information, awards) and Product resources (spec sheets, photos, install guides for individual products). Both are read-only — Resources is the show-the-customer tab, not the modify-it tab.
What the rep is doing. Pulling up the right piece of evidence at the right moment. When a customer asks "why this much?", a product spec sheet or an award badge is faster than an explanation. Resources puts that material one tap away so the rep doesn't have to break eye contact to find it.
What carries downstream. Nothing directly — Resources is appointment-side only. But the resources the customer sees during the appointment shape the customer's confidence in the option they pick, which shapes whether the deal closes.
Details
What it's for. The precise textual description of the work. Details has three sub-sections, all of which end up on the contract:
- Specifications — measurements, materials, and conditions that scope the job.
- Customer wills — what the customer will do to make the job possible. The customer's side of the agreement: "Leave access available to the property", "Mark power lines and utilities before work begins", "Stow animals safely during install." Bidvio uses the word "wills" because each line completes the sentence "the customer will…"
- Contractor wills — what your company is promising the customer. The company's side of the agreement: "Maintain a safe work environment", "Clean up the site after install", "Honour the warranty terms attached to this contract." Each line completes the sentence "the contractor will…"
What the rep is doing. Locking the scope before signing. Picking customer and contractor wills from the templates set up in Admin → Appointment Format, adding any one-off lines the conversation calls for, and filling in or correcting specifications. The wills templates exist so the rep is picking from a known library rather than writing prose from scratch under time pressure.
What carries downstream. All three sections — Specifications, Customer Wills, Contractor Wills — appear on the contract. Together they answer "what exactly are we doing, what do you have to do, what will we do?"
Summary
What it's for. The closing tab. Summary is not a passive preview — it's where the appointment becomes a sold job. The rep previews the document the customer is about to sign, captures the signature, logs the deposit, notes the tentative install date, and shares the documents with the customer in whatever channel they want.
E-signature on the spot. Summary supports on-screen signature capture, which is a particularly large win on iPad — the customer signs directly on the device with their finger or a stylus, and the contract is finalised in the same flow. No printing, no scanning, no follow-up "send me your signed copy" email.
Logging the deposit and install date. When the customer hands over a deposit at the close, the rep records the amount in Summary; that turns the contract into a receipt as well as an agreement. The tentative install date is captured here too, giving the install team a planning anchor before the job formally moves to scheduling.
Sharing the documents. Once signed and finalised, Summary exports the contract, proposal, and job-information sheet and shares them with the customer through email, text message, or AirDrop. The customer leaves the appointment with copies in hand, the install team has what they need in their system, and nothing depends on the rep remembering to follow up later that night.
What the rep is doing. Closing the deal. Walking the customer through the contract preview, capturing signatures, recording the deposit, noting the install date, and sending the customer their copies.
What carries downstream. Everything Summary captures — signature, deposit amount, tentative install date — lives on the contract and follows the job forward.
Finish the appointment
What it's for. The post-appointment data-capture step. After the rep walks out, Finish is where they record the result of the visit: was it sold, postponed, no-decision, lost to a competitor, customer not home? Finish keeps the appointment record accurate in the company's history so reporting later — close rate by rep, by source, by job type — isn't full of guessed outcomes.
What the rep is doing. Logging the honest answer to "what happened on this appointment?" and closing out the paperwork. This is a discipline step, not a sales step — but skipping it is what makes a sales pipeline opaque a month later.
For the detail of what Finish locks, what stays editable, and how the appointment record changes after Finish, see Closing the appointment.
Moving between tabs
The tab bar isn't a strict sequence — the rep can move freely between tabs at any point. Going back to Drawing from Options to fix a layer is normal. Bouncing into Resources mid-Options to show the customer a spec sheet is the point of Resources existing. Adjusting an answer on Information after walking the site is expected.
What the order gives the rep is a default path. When a rep is uncertain what to do next, walking left-to-right gets them to a signed contract. Experienced reps deviate when the conversation calls for it; new reps follow the order and end up running solid appointments.
A note on read-only states and admin unlocks
Once an appointment is sold, the workspace switches to read-only. The tabs are all still visible — the rep can review what they sold the customer — but Drawing, Details, Options, and Information no longer accept edits. Change orders are the normal path for changes after the close; they live in Managing customers & jobs.
If a sold appointment actually shouldn't have been sold — the customer backed out, the job was misrecorded, the rep hit Finish in the wrong status — an admin can unlock the appointment to make it editable again. Unlocking is intentionally an admin action so the audit trail of "what was sold" stays meaningful; reps can't unlock their own sold appointments to retroactively change a deal.