Winning a job is rarely a one-shot deal. You and your client usually go back and forth on scope, swap a few ideas, and only then land on something everyone’s happy with. Asking a client to e-sign a binding contract before you’ve settled all that can feel like proposing on the first date.
That’s what the Send Proposal option is for. It lets you send a client a proposal they can review and give a thumbs-up to — without locking either of you into a signed contract. Once you’ve nailed down the details, you send the real, signable contract. Think of it as a soft handshake before the formal agreement.
Proposal vs. final contract — what’s the difference?
A proposal is non-binding. Your client opens it, reviews the scope, and approves it with a click. There’s no signature and no commitment — it’s their way of saying “yes, this is the direction I want to go.” You can keep refining the scope afterward.
A final contract is the real thing. Your client e-signs it, you countersign, and the project officially begins. This is the same Finalize Quote and send-to-sign flow you already know.
Heads up: Sending an initial proposal is available on the Pro plan and above. If you’re on a plan below Pro, you’ll only see the option to send the final quote.
You can skip the proposal step entirely
This is worth saying plainly, because it trips people up: the proposal is optional. It’s not a required first stop on the way to a contract.
If your workflow doesn’t need a soft approval — you’ve already talked it through on the phone, or the client is ready to sign — just go straight to Send Final Quote to Client. Nothing breaks, nothing is missing, and you’re not skipping a step you’ll have to come back for.
Use the proposal when a soft “yes” is genuinely useful to you. Skip it when it isn’t.
Sending a proposal
Open the opportunity and build out your scope just like you normally would.
When you’re ready to share it, head to the quote editor. Over on the right, alongside the usual send button, you’ll see a Send Proposal button.
Before you send, decide whether you want your client to see pricing (more on that below).
Click Send Proposal. Your client gets an email and a text letting them know a proposal is ready to review.
You’ll see a confirmation that the proposal went out, and the client can now review and approve it from their messages.
One thing to know: a proposal can only be sent once. After it’s out, the Send Proposal button is disabled — from there you keep the conversation going and, when you’re ready, send the final contract. (You can always tweak the scope in between.)
Hiding pricing on a proposal
Sometimes you want a client to sign off on the direction before you show them numbers. You can do exactly that.
In the Display Options panel in the quote editor, turn off the Price toggle before you send the proposal. With Price hidden, your client sees the scope and what you’re proposing to do, but not the dollar figures — not on screen and not in the PDF.
When you’re ready to talk money, turn Price back on and send the final quote with everything visible.
Once you’ve sent the final quote, a visible price can no longer be hidden — at that stage the client is reviewing real, signable numbers, so the Price toggle locks on.
What your client experiences, step by step
Everything below describes the path your client takes when you’ve chosen to send a proposal first. If you send the final quote directly instead, your client never sees an approval step at all — they go straight to reviewing and signing. It’s worth walking through the two-step version once, so you can answer their questions without having to test it yourself every time.
1. They get an email and a text. Both land at the same time. The email subject reads “[Your company] sent you a proposal to review for [project]”; the text is a short note with a link.
2. They tap the link — no password, no account setup. The link signs them in automatically. There’s nothing to download, no account to create, and no password to remember. This is the part clients most often ask about, and the answer is genuinely “just tap the link.”
3. They land in their project portal. Not a one-off approval page — the link opens their actual project view, where they can look through the full proposal, scope and all.
4. They click Approve Initial Proposal. One click. There’s no signature step and nothing binding — it’s purely their way of giving you the green light. They’ll see a prompt reading “Please review the initial proposal and approve it to keep your project moving forward.”
5. You’re notified by email and text, so you know it’s time to move toward the final contract.
After they approve, nothing else happens on their end — and that’s correct
This is the single most common point of confusion, so it’s worth being direct about it.
Once your client approves, their part is done. There’s no next page, no next button, and nothing further for them to do. The approval has been recorded and the ball is now entirely in your court. If they were expecting to be carried onward to a signing step, that step doesn’t exist yet — because you chose the two-step path, and you haven’t sent the contract.
On their screen, the approve button is replaced by a confirmation that they’ve approved and are waiting on you for the final quote. The signing action stays greyed out until you actually send it. So if a client tells you “I approved it but it didn’t take me anywhere,” nothing has gone wrong — that’s the two-step flow working as intended.
What happens next is on your side: settle any remaining scope details, then send the final contract for signature. That’s when your client gets a fresh notification and a real signing step to complete.
A couple of related details:
They can only approve once. If they go back and try again, they’ll be told the proposal has already been approved. There’s no harm in them clicking around.
They can re-open the link to re-read the proposal. Approving doesn’t lock them out of it.
If you’d rather your client go from one notification straight to a signature with no waiting in between, that’s an argument for skipping the proposal and sending the final quote directly.
Want to see it for yourself? Use Preview — don’t send it to yourself
Plenty of contractors want to walk the client’s path before sending anything to a real customer. That’s a good instinct — just do it with Preview in the opportunity, which shows you the client portal exactly as your client will see it, without sending anything and without touching real data.
Don’t test by sending a proposal to your own email address. It seems like the obvious way to do it, and it causes real problems:
It signs you out of your own account. The link in that email is built to log in as the client. Clicking it swaps your session over, so you get booted out of your GC account and land in the client portal instead. You’ll have to sign back into Eano to get your own account back.
It can create a duplicate contact. Using your own email and phone for a client record confuses things — the system sees the same person on both sides of the job, and you can end up with a duplicate user that’s messy to untangle.
Preview has neither problem. The one thing it can’t show you is the moment after approval, since previewing doesn’t actually approve anything — but that’s covered in the section above, and the short version is that there’s nothing to see, by design.
Keeping track of where things stand
Eano keeps the proposal status front and center so you never have to guess.
In the quote editor, just under the send buttons, you’ll see timestamps as things happen:
Initial proposal sent — the date and time it went out.
Initial proposal approved — the date and time your client signed off.
In your opportunity pipeline, there’s a dedicated Proposal Sent stage. Your opportunities flow through New → Qualifying → Estimating → Proposal Sent → Contract Sent → Closed (Won), so a glance at the board tells you exactly who’s reviewing a proposal versus who’s ready for a contract. (The Proposal Sent column appears for Pro teams once you’ve sent your first proposal.)
Notifications at a glance
When you send a proposal, your client gets:
An email with the subject “[Your company] sent you a proposal to review for [project].”
A text along the lines of “Hi from [your company], a proposal for your project [project] at [address] is ready for you to review,” with a link.
When your client approves, you and your team get:
An email with the subject “[Client] has approved your initial proposal for [project].”
A text letting you know “[Client] has approved your initial proposal for [project] at [address],” with a link.
Then comes the final contract
Once the scope is settled and your client has given their soft approval, you send the binding contract exactly as you always have: Finalize Quote, preview as your client if you’d like, and send it off for e-signature. Your client signs, you countersign, and the fully-executed contract lands in the project’s Files area as the opportunity becomes a project.
The proposal step doesn’t replace any of that — it just gives you a friendlier, lower-pressure way to get to “yes” first.
A few things worth knowing
The proposal is optional. Sending the final quote directly is a perfectly normal way to work.
The link in your client’s email is good for about a week. After that it stops signing them in automatically. They’re not locked out — they can still get in by signing in with the code Eano texts or emails them.
Approval is a soft yes, not a commitment. Nothing is signed, and you can keep refining the scope afterward.
You’ll always know where things stand from the timestamps in the quote editor and the Proposal Sent stage on your pipeline.
Your client doesn’t need an Eano account, a password, or an app. Everything happens in their browser.
FAQ
My client approved the proposal, but says it just said “success” and took them nowhere. Did something break?
No — that’s the expected behavior. Approving an initial proposal is the last step on the client’s side. There’s deliberately no next page, because the next move is yours: send them the final contract, and they’ll get a fresh notification with a real signing step.
How does my client actually view the project?
Through the link in the email or text you sent. It signs them in automatically and opens their project portal, where they can see the proposal and scope. The same link keeps working if they come back to it later.
Can I send a proposal to myself to see what it looks like?
Better not to. Use Preview in the opportunity instead — it shows the client view without sending anything. Clicking your own client link logs you in as the client and boots you out of your GC account, and using your own email for a client record can create a duplicate contact.
Do I have to send a proposal before the final contract?
Not at all. Go straight to Send Final Quote to Client whenever you’re ready. The proposal is there for when a soft approval is useful to you, not as a required step.
Can my client approve the proposal more than once?
No. Once it’s approved, that’s recorded, and trying again just tells them it’s already been approved.
What’s the difference between a proposal and a final quote?
A proposal is non-binding and approved with a click. A final quote is the real contract — your client e-signs it, you countersign, and the project officially begins.
My client says the link doesn’t sign them in anymore. The auto-sign-in link expires after about a week. They can still get in by going to their project and signing in with the verification code Eano sends by text or email — no password needed.