Proposals

The proposal lifecycle

Every proposal in Ergate follows a clear lifecycle. Understanding these stages helps you track progress and know what to do next.

Stages

1. Draft — you've started creating a proposal but haven't submitted the brief yet. Drafts are saved automatically so you can return to them anytime.
2. Analyzing — the AI is reading your brief, extracting requirements, identifying risks, and flagging ambiguities. This is stage 1 of the pipeline.
3. Generating — the AI is scoping deliverables, estimating pricing, building a timeline, and writing the full proposal text. This covers stages 2 and 3.
4. Ready — generation is complete. You can now review, edit, score, export, and share the proposal.
5. Sent — you've shared the proposal with your client via a public link or exported file.
6. Viewed — your client has opened the shared link. View tracking shows you exactly when and how many times they looked at it.
7. Won / Lost — mark the final outcome to keep your win rate stats accurate.
8. Archived — archive proposals you no longer need to keep your dashboard clean.

What you can do with proposals

Ergate gives you a complete toolkit for every stage:

• Create — input a brief via paste, file upload, or URL fetch
• AI Pipeline — understand how the four-stage AI process works
• Edit — fine-tune the generated text with a rich text editor
• Price — adjust line items, toggle estimate ranges, and choose pricing models
• Timeline — review and edit project phases and milestones
• Score — get a 0-100 quality score with actionable improvement suggestions
• Export — download as PDF or DOCX
• Share — generate a password-protected link with view tracking

Dashboard overview

Your proposals dashboard shows all proposals sorted by last modified date. Use the status filters to focus on what needs attention — for example, filter to "Ready" to find proposals waiting for your review, or "Viewed" to follow up with clients who've already seen your work.