Consulting Engagement Scoping Calculator & Proposal Generator
Why This is an Opportunity
The workflow breakdown is that proposal content and proposal numbers live in the same unstructured document, so changing one number means hunting through prose to update every reference. The solution separates concerns: consultants define their rate card, create engagement phases with estimated hours per phase, list deliverables and exclusions, and the app auto-generates a formatted proposal with consistent numbers throughout. Save templates for common engagement types. Export to PDF. Track which proposals are sent, viewed, and accepted. Forms for data entry, templates for output, status tracking on a dashboard — all straightforward CRUD with PDF generation.
Key Pain Points
- •Updating a rate or hour estimate in one place but forgetting to update it in the summary table or total creates embarrassing inconsistencies
- •Each new proposal starts from a copy of a previous one, carrying forward client-specific language that must be manually scrubbed
- •No way to quickly model 'what if we add 20 hours to phase 2' and see the impact on total price and timeline
- •Proposal formatting and styling consumes nearly as much time as the actual scoping and estimation work
- •Tracking which proposals have been sent, which are pending client response, and win/loss rates requires a separate spreadsheet
Original Discovery
Independent consultants and boutique consulting firms go through the same painful dance with every prospect: estimate hours by workstream, apply rates, factor in expenses, build a phased timeline, write scope boundaries, and format it all into a professional proposal document. Each time, they start from a previous proposal and manually adjust numbers in a Word doc or Google Doc, inevitably introducing errors — like updating the hourly rate in paragraph two but not in the pricing table. A structured scoping tool that separates the data (rates, phases, hours, deliverables) from the presentation would eliminate hours of proposal prep.
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