There are a ton of different quote and proposal apps—including an option to make quotes/proposals in most invoicing apps like Harvest, accounting tools like Wave and QuickBooks Online, and more, along with dedicated proposal apps like Proposify.

The great thing with tools like that is that your finance stuff is kept together. If someone goes with your quote, it's easy to turn that into an invoice, and then a line-item in your income records.

But for automation and building quotes on demand, one alternative I like using is making quotes from standard document templates. With something like WebMerge, or Google Docs' new templating features, or a tool like PandaDoc or Qwilr that's halfway in the middle of a document template tool and quote/invoicing app, you can build a document template, and then "fill in the blanks" with Zapier or another automation tool. That way, you could manage quotes from say a product management app, inquiry form, or Airtable or similar database, list all the details, then have them turned into a document.

Qwilr and PandaDoc are fun hybrids that fit both the document template and quote/proposal model that could be worth trying (though I haven't used either in a few years; have used WebMerge and Google Docs templates more recently).

I really like panda doc. We have been using it for a while and love the simplicity of it. Use it for invoicing and contracts all the time.

If you're a Salesforce company the best tool for quote building is A5 Apps. It's essentially a quote templating engine that allows you to define a quote template in Google Docs. If the formatting option is available in the Google Docs WSIWYG editor then you're good to go. This allows you incredible flexibility in how your quotes are designed.

Because it's tightly integrated with Salesforce, you can then populate any of the following data in the Google Doc template you created and have your team members generating quotes by clicking a single button.

-> Account info: Name, Address, Key Contact
-> Deal Info: Subscription type, Launch date etc
-> Product level info: Product name, quantity, price, discounts, line item notes

The best part is it's only $7/month/user when other competing solutions that do the exact same like Conga or Salesforce CPQ are more than $50/month/user.

I've been using And.co for all of our business proposals, contracts, and invoices, and have been pretty happy with the service. I think we signed up sometime in 2016 and overall, I can't really complain. I kinda wish it had a little more flexibility in the API so I can integrate our third-party time tracking app data (Timely) and automate the invoices. I don't have a very "efficient" workflow, but it works for me and my client's unique requirements. The service has fluctuated in their pricing model, from freemium to free to freemium again - but I find a good amount of value for what I'm getting at the moment. Probably a lot of room for improvement in our workflow as I use Quickbooks SE for our accounting needs... gotta love solopreneur-ship.

I have been using Nusii for a while and would highly recommend it.

With Nusii you can create templates for easy re-use and the designs are always stunning. You can offer different options that potential clients can choose from and they also recently added support for accepting deposits via Stripe. So now you can charge a 20-30% deposit upon acceptance of the proposal/quote.

Wave is a great small business finance management tool. It is a great FREE tool that is simple to learn and has some great key features like payment reminder emails that can be scheduled and sent to clients if they haven't paid. https://www.waveapps.com

I'm trying to move away from my bad habit of relying on Google Docs/Slides templates for quotes.

I just started using SalesRight (https://salesright.co/) and it's intersting. To be open, I'm still on the free trial so am not paying for the service. It lets you build custom plans/items and easily share them, I need to spend more time to see if it fits our specific needs, but feel it could be useful for a lot of companies.

I've also noticed a lot of proposals from other people being sent using Bidsketch, so maybe there's an insight there too :)

Personally, I do my accounting with Xero. Xero has quoting functionality. So I guess take a look at your current invoicing platform and see if they support it?

I have tried most of them Proposify, Qwilr, HelloSign and others as well but at end we went for Pandadocs. Its far more better then its competitors. Plus the add-ons are very useful like advance reporting, white- labeling. Plus if you are planning to integrate these proposals with CRM, then Pandadocs has integrations with Hubspot and CRM both.
You can also automate much more with Zapier.

Practice Ignition? Looks like it will do the job for you.