Electrical Contractors' Association (ECA) Portal
The ECA sales team was assembling client proposals by hand from a shared folder of PDFs. We built a portal that holds every approved sales asset in one categorised library, and turns a selection of them into a single, client-ready document in minutes.
The Electrical Contractors' Association is the UK trade association for the electrotechnical sector, representing contracting businesses that install and maintain electrical and engineering systems. Its membership team sells to companies of very different sizes, and a proposal that lands with a two-person contractor is not the proposal that lands with a national.
So every proposal was assembled by hand. A salesperson would open a shared folder of PDF collateral, decide which pieces were relevant to that prospect, retype the covering letter, and stitch the whole thing together before sending it. It worked, but it was slow, it was inconsistent between individuals, and it had an expensive failure mode: nothing stopped a superseded document being pulled out of the folder and sent to a client.
We replaced the folder with a portal. Every approved asset lives in a categorised library with a thumbnail, a category and, where it matters, a window of dates during which it may be used. Building a proposal becomes a matter of choosing the assets, putting them in the right order, and pressing generate — with the covering pages written from the client record rather than retyped.
Inside the ECA Proposal Generator
How the portal turns a library of uploaded PDF assets into a targeted proposal in minutes. Screens are illustrative.
Every proposal in one place
The sales team works from a single list rather than a folder tree: what is in draft, what has gone out, who owns it, and when it was last touched. A proposal can be duplicated, so the second bid to a similar client starts from the first rather than from nothing.
That visibility is half the value. Before the portal, the only record that a proposal existed was the PDF in somebody's sent items.
The opening and closing pages write themselves
The first and last pages of every proposal follow the same rules — they just need the right client name, the right turnover band and the right membership package dropped into them. That is work a person should never do twice.
The portal generates both from the client details captured at the start, along with a contents page and continuous page numbering on export. Change the turnover band and the pages are rewritten. Nobody edits boilerplate by hand, and nobody sends a proposal addressed to the previous prospect.
Finding and combining the right assets
Assets are browsed by category, ticked to include, and dragged into the order they should appear. A running page count and file size sit alongside the selection, so nobody discovers the document is ninety pages after generating it.
The output is one combined PDF. It can be previewed, downloaded, or emailed to the client from inside the portal with supporting attachments — which means the proposal never has to leave the system to be sent.
Uploading that stops the wrong document going out
Uploading an asset is a drag and a few fields: a title, a category, the turnover bands it suits, and tags for context. Thumbnails are generated as it lands.
The important field is the date range. An asset outside its availability window disappears from the builder and is excluded from any export, so a price list or a certificate that has been superseded cannot reach a client by accident. That single constraint removes the most costly mistake the old shared-folder process allowed.
The technology stack
The back end is built on Yii2, a PHP framework, with MySQL behind it. The front end is React, which is what makes the selection and drag-to-reorder behave like a desktop application rather than a series of page reloads.
PDF assembly happens server-side, so the combined document is identical whichever machine it was built on — a detail that matters more than it sounds when several people are producing client-facing documents from the same library.
More of our work
This is one of several systems we have built for membership bodies and trade associations — see also the BICSc assessment and audit apps and an online AGM and member voting system built inside a governing body's own member portal.
If document assembly or proposal production is eating your team's time, our professional services software page sets out how we approach it, and our document automation capability covers the underlying mechanics. You can also browse the rest of our portfolio, read about what we build, or get a free quote.
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