Output templates dictate the content, formatting and layout of many of the documents you raise in The Layer. This lets you customise the look and feel of documents produced by the system.
These templates are collections of pages written in HTML, so some familiarity with this is advised before making any changes.
Administrator permissions are required to amend a template.
Templates, Pages and Styles
Three key elements - output templates, pages & styles - form the basis of quotation templates.
If you have Settings access, you can access the template definitions from:
Settings - Output Templates
Here you can see all of the document template configurations in your instance. The columns determine which type of document they relate to:
Signed Quotation
Quotation
Invoice
Credit Note
Purchase Order
Sales Order
Editing a Template
From the All Output Templates view, you can click a template name to see and edit its properties.
Template Header
The first tab allows you to specify a number of different properties for a particular group of pages. These include a name, CSS data, header and footer HTML, margins, background colours and sort orders.
Template Pages
Pages are the documents that make up the quotation, invoice etc, and contain a title and HTML mark-up. During the relevant stage of the sales process, these HTML templates are converted to PDF to be sent to the recipient.
It's also important that your documents look good as HTML templates alone as these can also be embedded into emails and presented via the customer portal.
Drag an existing page from the left column to the right to add it - order the pages as you would like them to appear.
Creating a New Page
You can create a New Page from the menu on the left side. HTML 4 and 5 are supported.
Some tips:
Design your HTML templates offline in an HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver
It is crucial that pages are prepared in HTML and do not contain any tags above <body></body>
If you’re creating a layout which stretches to the edge of the document, use a fixed width layout of approximately 900px when setting up your design space as converted quotations are set to a fixed with.
If you’re creating a fluid layout, use fluid layout and relative (percentage) widths to ensure that your document looks good in HTML on screens of any size. The PDF rendering process will handle percentage widths for you but it’s always good to test.
Styles
Styles enable you to customise the CSS styles within a document in order for you to manage consistent styling within your quotation template.
These are accessed from their own area - see Settings - Styles
Template Test
This tab lets you test out a template with a quotation on your system. You can choose to output this as a PDF if you prefer.
Please note that the test only supports quotations at this point.
Setting a Template
You can assign a template to a record type in the following locations:
Settings - Company Settings - Output Templates
Settings - Company Settings - Quotation and Sales
Settings - Sub Companies
If your instance of The Layer uses sub companies, each sub company can have its templates set here.
