Your client needs a clear offer: what you will deliver and what they will pay. Your team needs enough detail to estimate, plan and manage the work. A client-facing proposal and an internal estimate answer those different needs.
The client’s offer
The Proposal tab presents the work as stages and line items. Its descriptions and prices form the commercial offer used by your proposal document template.
A concise offer can group several internal activities into one client deliverable. For example, “Survey and drawings” might cover preparation, fieldwork, drafting and review. The client can understand the deliverable without needing the complete staffing plan.
The team’s estimate
The Project Budget tab breaks the work into deliverables and tasks. Resource estimates can describe roles, quantities and rates; expense estimates cover additional costs. Task pricing can be calculated from those estimates or set separately.
This estimate supports planning. It is not the same as actual time worked or supplier costs incurred, and a quoted client price is not proof that the work can be delivered within the estimate.
How much detail reaches the client
The budget editor is an internal working area, but information from it can be copied into the proposal. Sync Budget offers different consolidation methods and can include non-budgeted tasks as zero-value lines.
For that reason, “internal” does not guarantee that every task description will stay out of the client document. The sync choices, proposal line items and document template determine the content presented.
Review the finished document as the client will read it. Check that internal instructions, working assumptions and unnecessary task detail have not been included in the offer.
Keeping the offer and estimate aligned
The two views can be edited separately. A difference between their totals may be intentional, such as an agreed fixed price, or it may mean the proposal has not been updated after the estimate changed.
Sync Budget replaces the proposal’s existing stages and line items. It is useful for rebuilding the offer from the estimate, but it also replaces edits made directly in the proposal.
For the relationship between the tabs, see The two parts of a Drum proposal. For field definitions, see the proposal fields reference.