Proposals

A proposal is a concrete offer inside a deal — which inventory, over which periods, and at what price. Proposals are where negotiation happens; everything else in the deal wraps around them.

Every proposal belongs to exactly one deal and to exactly one proposal type. A deal can hold at most one proposal per proposal type; the organization may also set an overall cap on the number of proposals per deal.

Proposal types and the two-axis model

A proposal type has two independent characteristics:

A pricing model determines how the price is calculated.
An inventory binding (item type) determines what inventory the proposal sells against.

These two axes are independent.

Pricing model

The pricing model comes from the proposal type itself. Three models exist:

Model	How it prices
Digital	Playback frequency, spot duration, and ad-block structure drive price-list lookup and impression count.
Printed	Daily rates and sale rules price each surface for the placement period.
Directory	Prices are entered manually for catalog items — services, production work, or other non-display revenue.

Model

How it prices

Digital

Playback frequency, spot duration, and ad-block structure drive price-list lookup and impression count.

Printed

Daily rates and sale rules price each surface for the placement period.

Inventory binding

The inventory binding comes from the catalog the proposal type is linked to. An administrator can bind a custom proposal type to the digital or printed inventory catalog, or to a custom directory catalog.

This means a custom proposal type can sell against real digital screens or printed surfaces while using directory-style pricing. The typical use case is selling something on the screens that is not airtime — installation, production, antenna mounting.

Only the two built-in proposal types, digital and printed, count toward availability and saturation. A custom proposal type bound to digital inventory still syncs to CS Play. See the occupancy rule.

See key concepts for the summary and terminology for the definitions.

Placement periods

A proposal is divided into one or more placement periods. Each period defines a date range and carries its own inventory selection and prices.

Periods within a single proposal must not overlap on the same inventory item — the same display cannot appear in two periods whose date ranges intersect. Different items in overlapping periods are allowed.

Proposal states

The state lives on the current revision of the proposal. Four states exist:

State	Meaning
Draft	Being prepared; not visible as a commitment.
Pending Approval	Offered to the customer, awaiting response.
Reserved	Accepted; inventory is held.
Booked	Confirmed and final for this revision.

State

Meaning

Draft

Being prepared; not visible as a commitment.

Pending Approval

Offered to the customer, awaiting response.

Reserved

Accepted; inventory is held.

Booked

Confirmed and final for this revision.

Allowed transitions

Draft → Pending Approval
Pending Approval → Draft (back), Reserved
Reserved → Draft (back), Booked

Booked is terminal for the revision — a booked revision never changes state. To continue working on the proposal after booking, create a new revision (see revisions).

An employee whose role includes the proposal state override permission can move a revision to any state, bypassing the standard transition graph. The override bypasses the transition graph only. The availability check on entering Reserved or Booked still runs, and still rejects.

Saturation effect

Only proposals in the Reserved or Booked state count toward inventory saturation. Proposals in Draft or Pending Approval do not occupy inventory.

The two states are drawn the same way on the timeline but are not enforced the same way: only Booked capacity blocks anyone else from selling the display.

See availability and saturation for how occupancy is calculated.

Where prices come from

Every priced line on a proposal resolves against a rate card that an administrator maintains. See Rate cards for how they are built and attached to inventory, digital pricing and printed pricing for how the resulting figures are calculated.

Totals

A proposal aggregates its cost automatically:

Total for the period, with and without discount.
Subtotals per price type when custom price lists (surcharges) are involved.
A bottom-line total across all periods and price types.

Totals are displayed in the organization’s currency and recalculate as you edit rows. All money amounts are rounded to two decimal places (half-up).

Totals do not include tax or VAT.

Exports

A proposal can be exported in two ways:

XLSX export: Any proposal can be exported to a spreadsheet with configurable columns. The column set adapts to the proposal type — frequency and duration columns appear for digital proposals, for example — and includes columns for custom price lists and inventory fields.

Exporting requires the proposal-export permission.
Document-template export: A proposal can also be rendered through a document template into DOCX or PDF. Templates are filtered to those registered for the proposal’s type.

See document templates.

Synchronization with CS Play

Digital proposals (including custom proposal types bound to digital inventory) can be synchronized with CS Play for campaign playback. Synchronization operates per placement period, and a period changed after a sync is marked for another sync.

See CS Play integration for the synchronization workflow.

Deals created through the booking widget

When a deal is created through the public booking widget, it enters a closed mode that restricts proposal editing. In closed mode, the inventory composition of a proposal cannot be changed — displays cannot be added or removed. Dates, prices, and discounts remain editable.

See booking widget for how the widget creates deals.