Under Administration > Offers, you find all master data and templates around offer creation: text modules for recurring content, categories and keywords for structuring, mail templates for sending, and the configuration of workflow permissions.
Articles
Articles are reusable service and product building blocks with a standard label, unit, and unit price. They can be selected in every article item of an offer, which automatically pre-sets the label, unit, unit price, and description.
Article master data is maintained centrally in the Invoicing module under Administration > Billing > Articles. The full documentation is in the article Master Data – Invoicing in the "Articles" section.
Note: Without the Invoicing module active, the articles area appears instead under Administration > Offers > Articles. Functionality and operation are identical — only the path differs.
Text Modules
Under Administration > Offers > Text Modules, you store reusable text modules for offer items, e.g., standard service descriptions or disclaimers. Create a text block via New text block. In the dialog window you enter the Name of the block and, in the Content field, the text as a WYSIWYG block that can be maintained per language. In the offer items, you select the text block via a dropdown.
The order of text modules in the list can be adjusted via arrow icons.
Categories and keywords
Via Categories, you classify offers by business field or product type (e.g., consulting, training, maintenance). Keywords are freely assignable tags that additionally structure and filter offers. Categories and keywords are available as filter criteria in the offer overview.
Mail Templates
Under Administration > Offers > Mail Templates, you store the standard emails around offers — per language (German, English, French, Spanish, Slovak, and Turkish). Each email template contains subject and HTML body with placeholders such as %NUMMER%, %TITEL%, %KUNDE%, or %GUELTIG_BIS%. All placeholders are described in the article Create and Send Proposals.
ZEP ships six standard mail templates for offers, which you can adapt to your tone of voice:
Send offer – used when sending an offer to the customer by email.
Send order confirmation – only visible when the setting "Order confirmation after commissioning" is active, sent on the transition Commissioned → Confirmed.
Processor assigned – notifies the person set as the new processor of an offer.
Processor removed – notifies the person removed as processor of an offer.
Processor cleared – notifies involved persons when an offer no longer has a processor.
Reminder to follow up – used by the scheduler task Reminder to follow up on the offer (see article Basic Settings).
With the Test send button, you send a preview to your own address to check layout and placeholder resolution.
In the "Send test mail (to your own e-mail address)" column, a separate link is available for each of the six languages. Clicking it sends the preview in the selected language to your own e-mail address.
Workflow permissions
Under Administration > Offers > Access permissions, you specify per workflow action which roles may trigger it. You maintain the assignment via the pencil icon in the first column of the respective row, which opens a pop-up for selecting the authorized roles.
For each action, you select any number of roles from the following eight groups:
Administrators — always authorized (cannot be deactivated)
Controllers
Project controllers
Department managers of the offer department (only with the Locations and Departments module, always authorized)
Key account manager of the assigned customer
Project manager with budget responsibility of the assigned project
Responsible for the offer
Processor of the offer (except for the action Create offer, since at creation no processor exists yet)
Additionally, individual further employees can be authorized by name per action — useful for exceptions that do not match a standard role.
Configurable actions include:
Create offer — sets the initial status New
Delete offer
Create, change, or delete an offer template
Every individual status transition (In process, Done, In Review, Checked, Document Created, Sent by Email/Post, Commissioned, Confirmed, Transferred to Project, Invoiced, Rejected)
Revise — back to processing. From Commissioned, Transferred to Project, Invoiced, and Rejected, only administrators may do this.
For Create offer, Delete offer, and Create, change, or delete an offer template, the roles from Roles & Permissions apply, area Offers, rows Create Offers, Delete Offers, and Offer Templates. Here you add individual employees for these actions and, for deleting, also the Person responsible and Processor of the offer.
This enables precise enforcement of a multi-eyes principle — for example: Checked only by controllers, Commissioned only by sales leadership, Invoiced only by accounting.
Letter paper for offers
Note: Letter paper is stored centrally under Administration > My Company > Letter papers, across modules. The placeholders available for offers and the upload workflow are described in the article Create and upload letter papers.
Per department, two separate letter paper templates for offers can be created: a letter template for postal sending (typically with an address field per DIN 5008 and folding marks) and a mail template without an address block, sent as a PDF attachment of an email. This way, offers appear in the corporate design of the department — and the appropriate layout is selected automatically based on the sending channel.
If you create offers in several languages, store a matching letter paper for each language under Administration > My Company > Letter papers. ZEP then automatically selects the layout matching the offer language.
On the individual offer, this automatic assignment can be overridden: using the field "When pdf / odt / doc: use letter paper of the department", you select a different department whose letter or mail template is then used for this one offer — the offer's own department assignment stays unchanged. This makes it possible, for example, to send an offer in another department's corporate design. The field is only available if the Departments area is active.