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Templates

Templates are the reusable versions of things you send. Write once, use for years.

Templates in the sidebar opens four tabs, in this order:

Items. The things you charge for, so every invoice and proposal picks the same names and prices. See Items.

Contracts. Your standard agreements.

Questionnaires. Your standard sets of questions.

Emails. The covering messages you send with everything else.

The single most important thing about templates in CoreHue.

When you create a contract from a template, its content is copied. The new contract is its own document. Editing the template afterwards changes nothing about it.

That's right for legal and client-facing documents. A contract someone signed shouldn't change because you tidied a template months later. But it does mean:

  • Fixing a typo in a template doesn't fix documents already created from it
  • A contract or questionnaire attached to a booking service holds its own copy, so updating your template doesn't update the service
  • A questionnaire request already sent keeps the questions it was sent with

If you change a template and want the change everywhere, update the places that copied it.

Where templates get used​

Contract templates when you create a contract, when you build the contract inside a proposal, or when you attach one to a booking service.

Questionnaire templates when you build a questionnaire request, or when you set up a service's intake or scheduled questionnaires.

Email templates in every send composer: invoices, proposals, contracts, questionnaires, galleries, bookings, reminders and messages.

That last one is the sleeper. Email templates get used more often than the other two combined. Every one of those sends needs a covering note.

What every library can do​

The three template tabs work the same way:

  • New template writes one from scratch
  • Add from CoreHue opens a library of ready-made templates written for photographers
  • Duplicate copies one of yours, with "(copy)" added to the name, which is the quick way to make a variant
  • Delete removes one. Documents already created from it are unaffected

Add from CoreHue​

CoreHue keeps a library you can pull from at any time: contracts, questionnaires and emails, filtered by the kind of work they suit.

Open Add from CoreHue, narrow the list by the kind of work if you want, read the preview on the right, and press Add to library. CoreHue confirms. The copy is then yours, to edit or delete like anything else you wrote.

Templates you already hold drop off the list, so what's shown is always what you don't have yet. The catalogue holds 34 contracts, 26 questionnaires and 32 emails.

What you start with​

New accounts start with templates from that same library, picked to match the kind of work you said you do:

  • 5 contract templates
  • 5 questionnaire templates
  • 8 email templates

Those counts are fixed. Picking more kinds of work doesn't get you more templates. It changes which ones arrive. Each library starts with the ones everybody needs, then fills the rest from your specialisms, leaning towards the one you named as your main focus.

Read them before using them. They're written to be generally useful. The value is in adapting them to how you actually work. The contract starters especially contain real numbers you will be held to. See Contract templates.

That happens once. If you delete something and want it back, or want more than you were given, use Add from CoreHue.

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