What are the three settings pages for?
An offer PDF is made up of pages: standard pages that Eturnity maintains for all customers, such as the offer overview, components or profitability, and your company's own pages. With your logo, your colours and your own pages, your offer stands out from those of other installers who also work with Eturnity.
As an administrator, you use three pages in the settings to define, once for the whole company, what the pages look like and which of them appear in an offer:
Branding determines what the pages look like: colours, logo and, in the new PDF design, the cover image. Older documentation calls this area Co-Branding.
Custom pages turn your own PDF files into pages for your offers, for example your terms and conditions.
Document templates define which pages an offer contains and in which order.
In the project, your team then chooses the matching template and branding on the Offers page and adjusts the pages as needed.
Prerequisites
Only users with administrator rights see the three settings pages.
You can only create custom pages if your licence includes them; otherwise, Add page on the Custom pages page is locked.
To find the three pages: in the header, open the app launcher on the far left › Settings › in the left side menu, the Offer section.
Set up the pages in this order: first the branding, then your custom pages, and the document templates last. A template can only include pages that already exist.
New and previous PDF designs
Eturnity offers the standard pages in two designs: the new PDF design and the previous one. Eturnity configures which designs are available in your company's account; to switch to the new design, contact Support via chat or at support@eturnity.com. The design makes these differences to the setup:
The cover image only exists in the new design. The Branding page only shows the Cover image section if your company has pages in the new design.
A document template uses exactly one design. Templates in the previous design apply to one language, templates in the new design to all languages.
You can only include custom pages in templates in the previous design. In the new design, your team adds them in the project.
You can only set a template in the new design as the Default template for new projects.
The Button's text color in the branding only takes effect in the previous design, for example on the buttons of the page on the installation process.
1. Set up the branding
Several brandings are useful if you make offers under more than one identity, for example for a second brand, a business unit or a campaign. Your team chooses in the project which branding an offer uses.
In the settings, open the Branding page in the Offer section. Your brandings are shown as tiles on the left. Click a tile to edit it, or click Add branding below the tiles.
Under Branding name, enter a name by which your team recognises the branding in the project.
If this branding should apply when none is selected in the project, turn on Set as default branding directly below.
Under Document colors, enter four colours as hex codes, for example #1A73E8: the Main accent color for highlights such as circles, icons and total rows and for chart series, in the new design for example the production (in the previous design also for the footer bar and the triangles in front of subheadings), the Secondary color for further chart series and infographics, the Backup color for cases where two colours are not enough, and the Button's text color, which only takes effect in the previous design.
Click Save at the bottom.
Under Logo on PDF, upload your logo: trimmed, in PNG format, at least 70 pixels high and no larger than 1 MB.
In the new design, upload the image for the cover page under Cover image: JPG, PNG or WebP, at least 720 × 480 pixels and smaller than 2 MB.
Eturnity stores the logo and the cover image as soon as you upload them; Cancel does not undo the upload, and you replace a wrong image by uploading a new one. So save the name, the default-branding switch and the colours first. Each colour applies to all elements of its role; you cannot colour individual elements separately. The Example page on the right shows your colours immediately, but in the previous design, for example with buttons in the Button's text color; the note next to the Main accent color, “Emphasize text, subtitle, footer”, likewise applies in this form to the previous design. Check the result in the preview of an offer. How many brandings you can create depends on your licence. A different font is not a branding setting; it is one of the adjustments that Eturnity makes.
2. Upload your own pages
With custom pages, you add company-specific content to the offer, for example your terms and conditions, an introduction to your team, reference projects or your warranty and service offering. The standard terms and conditions page is only a placeholder; replace it with your own page before you send offers.
Eturnity adds neither a logo nor a page number to a custom page and fills in no project data. So design the whole file yourself, including your logo. If the file has several pages, all of them go into the offer. In the previous PDF design, Eturnity attaches the file unchanged. In the new one, Eturnity places each page of your file as an image on an A4 portrait page, so create the file in A4 portrait format.
Save the content as a PDF file of no more than 70 MB.
In the settings, open the Custom pages page in the Offer section and click Add page.
In the Create new custom page window, enter a Page name. Your team will later find the page under this name in the page selection.
Select the Language of the page. The page is only offered in projects whose correspondence language matches this language.
Under Technologies, tick all the technologies for which you use the page. The page is only offered in projects whose active variant contains one of these technologies.
Upload the PDF file and click Add page.
The uploaded file cannot be replaced later; when editing, you can only change the name, language and technologies. For a new version, for example amended terms and conditions, create a new page, put it in place of the old one in your templates and offers, and then delete the old one. If you send offers in several languages, create a separate page for each language.
3. Put together document templates
A document template is a ready-made sequence of pages for one type of offer. Your team selects it in the project instead of putting the pages together one by one each time. Many installers create templates to match their sales process: a non-binding offer that is drawn up quickly from the satellite image and often deliberately shows less detail, for example the costs without item prices; the detailed offer after the site visit; and the order confirmation after the signature. If your customer is to sign an offer electronically, the order form belongs in the template: it is the only page with signature fields.
In the settings, open the Document templates page in the Offer section and click Add new template.
If you see the Use new design switch under Document design, choose the design first. It cannot be changed after saving.
In the previous design, enter a Name and select the Language of the template. In the new design, enter a name for each of your company's languages under Manage translations; if your company works in only one language, the Name field appears there instead.
Under Document configuration, add the pages with Add page. Drag them by the handle into the order you want; to remove a page, click the bin icon.
If you want Expert to preselect this template in new projects, in the new design tick the Use as the default template for all projects. checkbox under Default template.
Click Save.
You can also set the Default template in the overview in the Default column. New projects then start with the right template straight away: when your team opens the Offers page in a new project for the first time, Expert applies the default template, whatever the correspondence language, provided one of its pages matches the technologies of the variant. Existing offers stay as they are. You can remove the default template again in its configuration: clear the checkbox and save.
Without a default template, Expert applies the first matching template; templates are listed in the order in which you created them. If the selection in the project includes pages in both designs, this is the first matching template in the previous design.
With the copy icon in the overview, you create a variation of an existing template. If you delete a template, it is no longer offered in projects; pages that have already been added to offers stay there. If pages are missing from the selection, check the design and the language: in the previous design, the selection only shows pages in the language of the template. When Eturnity announces new standard pages, check your templates and add the pages that fit.
4. In the project: choose pages and branding for an offer
The settings apply to the whole company; your team decides in the project, separately for each variant, what goes into the offer. To do so, in the variant you want, open the Offers page in the Offer group of the left side menu. In the first step, Offer settings:
Under Select template, choose a document template. Its pages appear under Page order. With Add document template, you add the pages of another template.
Adjust the pages under Page order: use Add page to add standard pages or your custom pages and Add data sheet to add data sheets. Add data sheet only appears if Eturnity has stored a data sheet in the component database for at least one main component in the Bill of materials of the active variant; the bill of materials only shows technologies that are ticked under Active technologies. You can choose from the data sheets of all these main components, including optional ones, with each language as a separate entry. Drag a page to change the order; you remove a page with the bin icon.
Under Details, choose the Address of your company or branch and the Branding. Without a selection, the default branding applies. While an Online offer is active in the project, the address and branding cannot be changed in any variant. Eturnity sets up your company and branch addresses; the article “Changing the content of the offer PDF” describes where the phone and email in the PDF come from and what a change of project manager affects.
Click Save in the bar at the bottom.
Click Preview PDF. In the Preview PDF and edit text step, check the offer and download it with Download PDF.
For variants with photovoltaics without a 3D Panel layout, the page is simpler and has no steps: there you likewise choose the template, Page order, Address and Branding; but Preview PDF opens the preview in a new browser tab, and there is no Online offer there.
The template, page order, address and branding apply per variant: each variant of a project has its own offer, including the texts you change in the Preview PDF and edit text step. If you duplicate a variant, the copy takes over the pages, address and branding, but not the changed texts; after that, you change everything in each variant separately. Your document template in the settings is not affected by this.
Reset to template replaces the pages with those of the selected templates; added data sheets are kept and move to the end. If the selection in the project includes pages in both designs, which also depends on the technologies of the active variant and on the correspondence language, the page also shows the Use new design switch; the selection then only shows the standard pages of the design that is set, but your custom pages whichever way the switch is set, and Expert does not take over any standard pages of the other design from templates. The text in the PDF follows the correspondence language of the project, not the language of your interface.
Download PDF and Preview PDF are locked as long as no page is selected, changes have not been saved or the financing is not up to date, and for variants with photovoltaics also while the simulation is not up to date.