Guide

Pending upgrades — coming soon

A few connections are in the works that will make the tool even more useful:

What's new — and why it helps

A handful of upgrades landed recently. If you’ve used the tool before, these are the ones worth knowing.

Getting started

Log in with your Symphony email (first time in, set a password from the invite link). The left sidebar is your map: Guide (this page), Overview for headline numbers, New Deal to price, Pricings for everything you can see, and Rate Card for the current rates.

Create a deal

Click New Deal and fill the attributes at the top — they identify the deal and drive the currency maths:

• Client and Opportunity name — the client and the HubSpot deal name.
• HubSpot ID — ties the deal to your CRM (it appears in the approval email too).
• Quote type — Time & Materials, T&M Capped, Fixed scope / fixed price, or Fixed price fee.
• Deal currency (USD or EUR) and the FX rate — Finance sets the rate per deal.

Choosing the client

The Client field is a picker — start typing and choose from the approved client list, so names stay consistent across deals and reports.

If the client you need isn’t there yet, type it and choose “+ Request … as a new client”. That does three things: emails the admins to validate it, lets you carry on and save the deal, and shows an orange note that the client is waiting for validation. Once an admin approves it, the note clears and the name joins the list for everyone.

Build the project plan

Add a resource row per person or role, then allocate hours across the months. The app fills in the numbers as you go — rates from the rate card, cost from the salary sheet, totals and per-line GM1 live.

Let the Plan Assistant build the rows for you

Instead of adding rows by hand, you can describe the team in plain English and the Plan Assistant (the input box above the plan) creates the rows for you. It works out the role and seniority, sets the duration, and prefills the monthly hours (about 151 h per fully-allocated month, edge months pro-rated) — always showing a confirmation note so you can check it.

• Say the role, a seniority (junior / medior / senior / principal), and a duration (“for 6 months”). You can add a discount too.
• List several people in one go, separated by commas.
• Made a mistake? Each request can be undone — it removes exactly the rows it added.

Add contingencies

Contingencies are buffers applied on top of the raw plan — FX, staffing (salary increase, geography, seniority), effort, cost items (travel, hardware, licenses), discount on fee, and service/referral fees. Each is a percentage or an absolute amount.

Read the margin

The app is the source of truth. As you edit it shows Revenue (EUR), GM1 (before contingencies & overheads), and GM2 (the headline margin after everything). Every GM2 carries a rating so you don’t have to memorize thresholds:

The four views

Inside any deal you can switch between four tabs without leaving the page:

Send a deal for approval

This is the part that changed most — the whole loop is designed to happen over email and land you exactly where you need to act.

1. 1
   Finalize the pricing
   When the pricing is ready, click Finalize — approval in HubSpot. Status moves to finalized. The deal stays editable — approval happens in HubSpot, not here.
2. 2
   Approval happens in HubSpot
   Your normal HubSpot approval process runs on the linked deal. Nobody approves inside the Pricing Tool.
3. 3
   Import the approval
   Back on the deal, click Check HubSpot approval. The app reads the HubSpot deal's stage and shows it. When it's in an approved stage, the deal becomes approved · locked and its numbers are frozen.
4. 4
   Questions? Comment & @mention
   Use the comment thread and @mention a colleague (who can see the deal) to ask something — they get an email with a link back to the same spot.
5. 5
   Iterate with Clone
   An approved deal is read-only. Need a variant? Clone makes a fresh draft; the original stays as the record.

Comments & @mentions

Every deal has a comment thread at the bottom. Type @ and pick a colleague from the list to tag them — that attaches their name so they’re actually notified. Mentioned people get both an in-app notification and an email with your comment and a direct link to the deal’s summary and thread.

Who sees what

Salary and cost detail is sensitive, so each person sees a deal at their own access level. Admins and Finance always see everything; others see one of these:

The same protection applies everywhere — the deal list, dashboard totals, and exports — so numbers never leak through a side door. Sharing a deal shows it to someone at their own level, never above it.

Handy to know

Where do the rates and salaries come from?

Live from the central salary Google Sheet, read only when the app calculates. Use Refresh on the Rate Card page for the latest. Once a deal is approved, its numbers are frozen — a later rate change won’t move an approved deal.

Can I reopen a submitted deal?

Yes, while it’s still submitted — reopen it to a draft to edit. Once approved, it’s locked; use Clone instead.

I don’t see costs on a deal — is something broken?

No — that’s your access level (Average or Project-GM). You’ll still see revenue and margin. Ask an admin if your role needs changing.