Express offers are the fastest way to turn a customer support request into a formal offer – directly from the ticket, without creating a separate project. This video walks you through the complete workflow: from estimating effort and attaching products to sending the offer to the customer.
Before you can use express offers, three prerequisites must be met: the ticket must be in an external project, Express Offers must be enabled in the project settings, and an hourly rate must be configured for the project. Setup takes less than a minute and applies to all tickets in the project afterward.
Within the ticket, you enter the estimated working time and optionally add products from the catalog – fixed-price products only, no subscriptions. Leadtime calculates all line items automatically. The finished express offer includes working time, products, net, VAT, and gross totals, along with a personal message to the customer. You can send it by email or download it as a PDF.
The customer receives an automated email with a link to a public offer page – no login required. There they can see all items, prices, and totals, and accept or decline the offer with a single click. The decision is immediately documented in the ticket, including timestamp and contact person.
After acceptance, the express offer automatically flows into invoice review once the ticket is set to Closed. From there, you create the invoice with one click. The entire process – from ticket to offer, from offer to acceptance, from acceptance to invoice – runs seamlessly. Additionally, express offers appear in the sales area, so even small jobs are visible in your sales pipeline.
In the last video, you set up the product catalog with standardized services, fixed prices, variants, and options. Now I'll show you where you can put those products to work first: in express offers.
Imagine a customer reaches out through support. They need a bug fix, a small feature extension, or a quick workshop. Nothing huge, but they want to know the price before you start. Until now, that meant writing an email, calculating a price, maybe putting together a PDF. With express offers, you do it right from the ticket. Formal, automatically calculated, in under a minute.
An express offer is a mini offer that you create directly from a ticket. It combines estimated working time with optional products from the catalog and turns that into a formal offer document.
This is not meant for large projects. For complex calculations with multiple modules and long service descriptions, there are project offers, and those come in a later video. Express offers are for the small, clearly defined requests. The customer asks, you estimate, you send an offer. Done.
The advantage: no email back-and-forth, no manual math. The customer immediately gets a professional document with all items, prices, and the option to accept or decline right online.
Before you can use express offers, three things need to be in place.
First: the ticket must be in an external project. Express offers are designed for customer requests, not internal tasks.
Second: in the project settings under Basic Settings, Express Offers must be enabled. It's a simple toggle. Switch it once, and all tickets in this project can generate express offers.
Third: the hourly rate must be set up in the project. Leadtime automatically multiplies the estimated working time by this rate. If no hourly rate is configured, Leadtime can't calculate the labor portion.
The setup takes less than a minute. And after that, it's available for every ticket in this project.
I open a ticket in an external project. In the right sidebar, I see three areas that are relevant for express offers.
At the top: the effort estimate. Here I enter how many hours I plan for this task, for example 4 hours. Leadtime automatically multiplies that by the project's hourly rate.
Below that: products. If the offer should include not just working time but also standardized services, I add them here. I click Add Product, and it opens the product catalog from the last video.
Important: only products with a fixed price can be attached to tickets. No subscriptions, no variable prices. That makes sense because an express offer is a one-time thing.
If a product has variants, I select the right one. For example, travel costs: standard at 0.30 euros per kilometer, or flight trip at 0.50 euros per kilometer. Then I enter the quantity, 400 kilometers, and Leadtime calculates the amount automatically.
All added products appear in the ticket sidebar and are automatically included as line items in the express offer.
Below the products in the sidebar, I see the Express Offer section. I click Create Express Offer.
A dialog opens with several fields.
Comment to the customer: here I write a short personal message that appears in the offer email. For example: Hi Martina, here is our offer for extending your contact form.
Contact person: I select the right contact on the customer side. This person receives the offer directly by email.
Language: I set whether the offer should be created in German or English. This affects both the email and the PDF.
Below that, I see the item overview. All offer items are listed here: the estimated working time, for example 16 hours at 150 euros each, and below that the products from the catalog. Each item shows the unit price, quantity, and total price. Leadtime automatically calculates net, VAT, and gross total.
Then there's the toggle Include Estimate. When enabled, the estimated working time shows up as its own line item in the offer. When disabled, the offer only contains the products. That's useful when the labor is already included in a product price.
I check everything and click Save. The offer is created and assigned to the ticket.
Now I have two ways to get it to the customer. I can send it directly by email, where the customer gets a message with a link to the offer. Or I download the PDF and send it through a different channel.
Once the offer is sent, I see the status in the ticket: Pending means sent, no response yet. When the customer reacts, the status changes to Accepted or Rejected. All actions are documented in the ticket log with a timestamp and contact person.
Let's look at what happens on the customer side.
The contact person receives an automatically generated email from Leadtime. The subject line contains the offer number. The email includes a short intro text in the selected language and a button labeled Accept or reject.
When the customer clicks the button, they land on a public offer page. No login required. On this page, they see everything: offer number, project name, creation date, the current status, all items with unit prices, quantities and totals, the summary with net, VAT, and gross total, and the personal message from the comment field.
At the bottom of the page, there are two buttons: Accept and Decline. The customer clicks, and the decision is immediately documented in the ticket, with date, time, and name.
The customer also receives the offer as a PDF attachment. With sender information, offer number, customer address, detailed items, and totals. The PDF serves as formal documentation.
This is professional. The customer doesn't need to call, doesn't need to reply, doesn't need to write their own email. One click, and you know where you stand.
What happens after the customer accepts?
Express offers automatically appear in the invoice review, but only when two conditions are met: the customer has accepted the offer, and the ticket has been set to Closed status.
When both are true, I open Billing, then Invoice Review. There I see the entry for the express offer. The detail view shows the offer number, title, calculated effort, any products, and the net amount.
I click Settle up to create the invoice. After that, the entry disappears from the review list and moves to receivables.
This is the seamless workflow: from the ticket to the offer, from the offer to acceptance, from acceptance to the invoice. Nothing gets lost, nothing gets forgotten. If you want to see the billing process in detail, check out video 21. For invoice delivery, there's video 22.
One last thing: the bigger picture. Express offers aren't just a support tool. They also show up in the sales area.
I open Sales, then Estimates. Here I see all offers: both express offers from tickets and project offers. Both types can be displayed together or separately.
In the list view, I can filter and sort by organization, project, status, type, and other criteria. Columns can be customized and saved as personal views.
The Kanban view is even clearer. All offers are grouped as cards by status: Draft, Pending, Accepted, Final. Above each column, I see the totals, broken down by fixed price, subscriptions, and price per unit. At the very top, there's the total volume across all offers.
This means even your small express offers feed into the sales pipeline. You always see the full picture: not just the big projects, but also the many smaller jobs that often add up to a significant share of your revenue.
We'll look at the sales area in detail in the next video.
Express offers are the fast track from a support ticket to a formal offer. Estimate the effort, attach products, create and send the offer, all from the ticket, without a separate project.
The customer gets a professional document, can respond directly online, and billing runs automatically. From the ticket to the offer, from the offer to the invoice, in one seamless workflow.
In the next video, we'll look at the sales area: how you track sales opportunities, manage your pipeline, and keep an overview of all your offers.
