Help Center / Videos / How to Write an Internal Company Proposal /

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channel

In this video we're going to show how to use the Proposal Kit to create internal company proposals. There's really not much different technically between any kind of proposal. It's just a different set of chapters you may select whether you're doing a proposal or document to a client or an RFP submission to an outside organization or entity versus you doing an internal company proposal to say your boss or to another department.

In the end you're still creating a Word document that you're going to fill out with certain set of information, maybe save it as a PDF and print and deliver or save it as a PDF and email it. Technically all these documents can be generated by using the same Proposal Pack. It's just a matter of selecting different chapters and what design theme you want.

We're going to illustrate this with our Communication #4 design. Now, Proposal Kit has hundreds and hundreds of visual design themes and it has features in the Expert edition to create your own design theme and to customize our design themes. Whichever design theme you purchase is what the visual look of all the documents you create will look like.

We'll illustrate this with Communication #4. What yours looks like will be whatever design theme you've selected and customized. The Wizard software will show all of our available design themes.

Whichever one you've purchased and installed will be shown here but the drop downs will also show you what's available on our website. Whenever you're going to create a new document you'll click this Document Projects button. We will Add a New Project and just give it a title whatever you want.

This Pick Documents button is where we are going to select all of the chapters that make up the document. The first screen you come to will have a bunch of tabs, it'll be on the Add Templates tab usually and you'll see a bunch of check boxes. These are the 40 most common chapters most people are going to use for the documents like Cover Letter, Back Cover, Title Page, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, a cost page, and so on.

There are thousands of actual templates like these you can use to build up your document and you can get access to those through all these other drop downs. If you need to select chapters about your company you've got those here. If you want technical pages, intellectual property pages and so on.

You can also use the Search by Name tab so if we want to find say the Mission Statement we can just type in the word mission. If you need a budget template or any topic that's in the library just type in a word that's related to what you're looking for. Do a search and we'll find all matching and related templates.

It found anything with actually the word mission in the title. You see the Mission Statement here and you can check this and add it to your project. Now this Quick Start tab this will have hundreds of layouts of those chapters for different situations and these will be all different kinds of proposals for all different kinds of industries.

We'll just narrow down the list of ones that are tagged to be good for internal company proposals to get started with. Now, you're not limited to these lists, these are just lists of chapters that we've come up with or clients of ours have come up with that have been used to create their proposals. Let's say a Business Case Document, that's a good internal document where you're making a business case for a specific situation.

This business case has 23 templates in the list and we'll just import that list into our project. So now you see we have 23 pages selected. Note if you've got the Expert edition there's no limit on the length of your documents.

The Novice Edition of the software that comes with the basic Proposal Packs limits you to 15 pages. You can see this list of 23 chapters for the business case layout you'll start with an Executive Summary, a Synopsis, Expected Results, Recommendations, the Team Members who are going to be working on it, your Problem Statement, Impact Statement and so on. Goals and Objectives, your Project Plan, Assumptions, Project Constraints and so on.

A business case document can mean countless things depending on the situation so you can completely customize these lists. You don't even have to start with a pre–made list, you can just start checking off chapters from the library. These pre–made lists just get you started a little faster with ideas maybe you hadn't thought of for different kinds of templates.

We can totally customize this list of 23 chapters. We can go over to Add Templates tab say if we didn't want the Expected Results or something. We can just uncheck that or you can go to the Remove Templates screen.

We can remove the Migration template now we're down to 22. Now we can go and add additional chapters. Let's say we want to add the Action Plan or a call to action page.

Now the Action Plan has been added and we can move this down in the order. We can customize the order that these chapters will be put into the document. Let's say we put our Action Plan at the end our final call to action.

Now that we've set our list of chapters that we want for this particular internal company proposal when we're all done click the Ok, use Selected Templates button. You can use the Company Data and Client Data screens. The Company Data, this is going to be your name and address information, your company, the person writing the proposal.

Since this is an internal company proposal the Client Data screen is probably going to be from your company as well but it's going to be the person writing the proposal. Your name, your address, email address and so on. This is just data that's going to get merged into the document when it gets generated and which is all editable in the Word documents when it's created.

So now that we've got a set of chapters, we've put in the Company and Client Data, when we click this Ok, Save Project button this is when the Wizard will generate that document applying all the customizations we've set. Now we just wait for it to create the document. Okay, this document has been generated.

We'll open it and take a look at it and you'll note the title on the front cover says Analysis. By default, this word is the word Proposal. There's actually about 20 some options for you to change this to anything you want.

When we loaded that business case layout that business case layout actually has the Analysis graphic selected as its Title Page graphic. This is also a placeholder for if you're going to customize the templates with your own company logo. Your logo will be put in this spot so that's one of the reasons you usually pick a Proposal Pack design theme that's a good fit for your own logo.

Maybe it matches your logo colors or design closely which means adding your own logo will mesh well with that design theme. This is another reason companies with graphic design skills usually will create their own branded design theme using the Professional edition so you can set your own graphics, colors design and so on using your own logo and color scheme. Even with the Novice Edition the Novice Edition will swap in your logo in this spot which you can do manually in Word just by replacing the graphic.

You'll see the Table of Contents and this is the list of all the chapters we selected. You can see the customizations we made where we added the Action Plan. As you scroll down this template it is ready to start editing and things like the URLs which is ours right here that's actually the URL that you would have entered in the Company Data screen.

This is again just text. You can edit anything in this document that's been created for you. We'll just scroll down you can see all the pages ready to fill in.

If you're using cost related pages like Cost/Benefit Analysis the cost pages, price pages, budgets and so on they all have associated calculator spreadsheets. You can use these spreadsheets and you can see for our project because we added the Cost/Benefit chapter it also added a Cost/Benefit Analysis Calculator Spreadsheet to our project. We can pop that open and you have a Cost/Benefit Calculator with calculations and line items already added.

You can use this Excel spreadsheet to do your calculations and then enter in those calculations into the Word version for the display in the final document. Now, if you are using our Expert Edition of the Wizard software and you have enabled the OLE linking features you can actually directly link the cells of this Word document table to the cells of the Excel spreadsheet. So, as you update the spreadsheet it will auto update into the Word document.

For illustration purposes for this demo video we've turned that off but that is an expert edition option to make it easier to do calculations and have them updated in the Word document. The Back Page, and again, this is the company data that we entered into the Company Data screen. Whatever you type in will get merged into the document.

What you're seeing here with the background colors, the graphics, this logo. That is part of the Communications #4 design theme. Whatever one of the hundreds of design themes you picked that will set the design of the document.

Now we'll illustrate another example of an internal company proposal. We'll just pick a different design theme. Now we'll use our Aqua #6.

This design theme uses an iceberg style background graphic, the tip of the iceberg. That's a common business theme. I'll just use that to illustrate this proposal.

We have all of our design themes loaded into our copy of the Wizard here for the demo. Whichever one or more you purchased, those will be the ones that you can select. I will create a second project, we'll do a business strategy proposal.

Again, we'll go to the Quick Start links just to get started faster. A business strategy change and implementation that's another good internal company project proposal that's fairly complicated. Import the topics and you'll see this time we have 37 chapters.

This is going to be a pretty extensive document for a complex internal company proposal. Your proposal might only need to be four or five pages long, maybe a quick proof of concept or something 10 pages. We're just illustrating a very complex one just so you can see how complex you can get.

We're just going to use this set of chapters as is we won't make customizations this time. You can just scroll down you'll see again it uses the Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents just like before. Introduction, Executive Summary, but now all the body pages are completely different for this internal company proposal and we ended with a Back Page again.

Remember last time we did a search for the Mission Statement to show you how the Search by Name tab works. This layout just happens to have the Mission Statement already in it. We can customize this like last time from the existing library.

We'll just use this one as is and save the project. Assuming we've entered our Company and Client Data. Now we'll just wait for the Wizard to finish building this document.

Okay, this document's been generated. I'll open that up take a look at it. In this case we turned on that dynamic Excel linking option to show that.

That's the Expert Edition feature. Note too, since this is a 37–page document that documents that long and complex are created through the Expert Edition, the Proposal Kit Professional. The Novice Edition will limit you to 15 page documents.

You'll see these tags here, these are the Client Data screen tags. We didn't fill that screen in when we created this project. If we had that would be filled in with the client data information.

You can see the Aqua #6 design theme. This is a good business design theme that invokes the idea of the tip of the iceberg. Your company logo again can go here.

Now, last document it had the Analysis graphic. This one has the Plan graphic. Again, this could be proposal, business plan, there's over 20 different options to replace this and it can also be used as the spot where your logo will go in the spot.

You can see the 37 chapters we selected for this document. This document is ready to start editing and you can see this plan template has an associated Excel spreadsheet. So financial related chapters and schedule related chapters we have related Excel spreadsheets to go with so you can do calculations and planning in the spreadsheets.

This 37–page document used three chapters that have Excel spreadsheets and in this example we've used the Excel dynamic linking feature where we can edit the spreadsheets and have them auto update into the Word document. If you are going to edit the spreadsheets and the Word document while they're both open at the same time you need to open the spreadsheets first and then open the Word document. Otherwise, if you do it in a reverse order this is just the way Microsoft Office works is the spreadsheet will be in read–only mode.

You can get that little notice here it's locked from editing. So, i'll just close this Word document and we will open the spreadsheets first. Now we have those open.

Now we will open the Word document. Typically it is faster if you just do your edits in Excel spreadsheets with the Word document completely closed then when you're done editing the Excel spreadsheets make your saves there then open the Word document and then select the option for the Word document to auto update. That can be more efficient than having them all open on your screen at the same time.

We'll show how this works. Here's the financial related chapter Income Projection. You can see all these are linked cells.

If I click them the entire cell highlights as opposed to just text where you see where your cursor just goes to the insert point. The entire cell is selected. That's an indicator that that's actually a linked cell.

We'll go over the Income Projection Calculator. You can see these are actually linked as well to these cells and you can see the spreadsheet has lots of line items for doing the calculations and these cells down here are what is linked into the document. This is a good example where we're showing a very complex Excel spreadsheet but for your Word document you don't want to show all the fine details of the whole spreadsheet.

We don't want to just do a copy and paste of the entire spreadsheet into the Word document. We just want the highlights in a nice presentation format which is what we use the Word document for. Okay, so we'll fill in some amounts here.

We've filled in some amounts for some line items and let it do its default calculations. You can see it's calculated up a bunch of these fields and now when we save this document it's kind of spinning here and Word is auto updating the Word document using these calculations. Using Excel dynamic spreadsheet linking is a good way to prevent typing errors copying in the calculations, line items and stuff from spreadsheets and manually entering them into your Word documents.

At least you know that values will be identical and also if you're doing a complex project where you might be doing calculation changes frequently you don't have to keep retyping into the Word document. You just let the Word document auto update. So that will illustrate the dynamic spreadsheet linking and a complex internal company proposal.

So that is how you use Proposal Kit to create custom internal company proposals.