Articles / Proposal Kit Review /

I needed to present a professional proposal and I needed it fast. My schedule was too full to completely design one so I went searching for a product. I found the Proposal Kit Professional and fell in love. Well, maybe not love, but it's pretty darn nice.

Proposal Kit Professional is geared towards many types of businesses. The Proposal Kit Professional comes with templates for various parts of a proposal, you pick and choose from thousands of templates. The Pro version is the best value. You not only get the Proposal Pack with the templates, sample filled out templates and a style (design) but it comes with quite a few other products.

Included in the Proposal Kit Professional is a whole range of contract tools as well. For new web designers or small design companies starting out on a limited budget, contracts are an expensive proposition. While no contract package can take the place of an attorney, they may be a good starting point for you. For many independent designers/developers you may be able to use the contracts. But if in doubt or need additional clauses, be sure to consult a contract attorney.

Briefly, the options are:

Proposal Kit Professional which includes, proposals, legal contracts, a Project Management Pack, a price Estimate Pack and sample proposals to learn from. There are also four graphic design styles (Proposal Packs).

Proposal Pack Wizard, a stand alone product that is pretty handy, but not required. It's an interface I found quite easy to use. I could browse through the templates and choose the ones I wanted for my specific project. The wizard then generated just the templates I selected into one file.

Proposal Packs are generic for any type of business. All the packs have the same templates but the graphic design is different in each. This is a stand alone package [and can be used as add-on styles to the Proposal Kit Pro/Standard bundles]. You don't need to purchase the other kits if general business is what you need.

If you are handy with graphics you can customize your own proposals and contracts by making your own graphics which you can then use with the kits.

All in all I found this product to be quite useful. It took a little bit of time to read through the extensive help files but I was able to do a professional proposal in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Now to break out the contracts!!!

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What Joyce said, plus -

Pamela Beason of Beason Writing and Editorial Services, technical writer and editor, author or multiple fiction and nonfiction books writes:

Like Joyce, I need to develop project outlines and write proposals from time to time, but perhaps unlike Joyce, I work in so many different fields that I need a wide variety of proposal templates to assemble into a wide variety of packages and reports. I work on some super-technical projects for software gurus and scientific types, and then I also do a lot of creative and educational projects, too. And no matter what I'm looking for, in Proposal Kit I can find a template or a sample proposal that is exactly - or at least pretty darn close to - what I'm seeking.

To tell the truth, there is so much information packed into these Proposal Kit products that I haven't even looked at half of what I downloaded from the website. But I know that what I need most likely is there, because every time I've needed to find more information, I've always been able to put my hands on it. The volume of help files and guides and articles is frankly, a little overwhelming. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather work in the information overload zone than be left alone in dark emptiness wondering where the heck I am. For me, there's nothing worse than having only an always-busy product support number to call, and these days, that's what you get with a lot of products. The situation is exactly the reverse with Proposal Kit. You want help, you want guides, you want tips, you want examples - you've got them.

I'm usually so busy (and disorganized) that I greatly appreciate products that make my life easier. When I use Proposal Kit, I know that I don't have to plan out every picayune detail in advance. The templates suggest all sorts of information to include (thank heavens!) and they provide structure that I desperately need when I'm short on time (which is pretty much every day). Of course Proposal Kit can't do the actual writing for me, but I'm so grateful that the company has already done a lot of the thinking about and planning for what should go on the pages - that's the most time-consuming part of a proposal project for me.

I can just read down the list of templates and find all sorts of pages that I need to include in my proposal or report. The list itself is a great reminder for me. Next, I can simply open each template and peruse the instructions there, and then gather the specific data I need for my project and enter it on the page.

When I'm working on a project in a field that I'm not so familiar with, I can get great ideas from the sample proposals. As a matter of fact, some of them are interesting enough that I've wasted quite a bit of time just wandering around through that library. I'm also sort of an amateur artist, so I especially like to look at all the different graphic designs (aka "skins") splashed throughout the samples.

There's a whole library of contracts, too. Except for nondisclosure agreements, which I use constantly, I don't have a need for too many different types of contracts. But when I do, I know I can lay my hands on great examples within Proposal Kit, and those documents will make me look like I know what I'm talking about. There aren't many products I've found that can speed up a writing process, but Proposal Kit is one of them. It can even help with invoices. Now if Proposal Kit could only do my editing for me...