[Autotask] [ConnectWise] Create project from won quote / Activate existing project

What is the problem or wish?

When a quote is won in Salesbuildr, the post-sale flow currently supports creating a ticket and optionally a contract. For Autotask and ConnectWise customers who handle project-based work, there is no equivalent option to create or activate a project from the same flow. This is a gap relative to what both PSAs already support natively: Autotask's Won Opportunity Wizard, and ConnectWise's conversion of an opportunity into a project.

In Autotask, the standard workflow for project-based sales works as follows: a Proposal Project is created during the quoting phase and linked to the opportunity. When the opportunity is won, the Won Opportunity Wizard converts that Proposal Project into an active client project, assigns tasks, and makes billing items available for project charges. Salesbuildr currently does not expose this step, meaning users either have to fall back to Autotask to complete the handoff, or skip project creation entirely and risk won quotes going unprocessed.

In ConnectWise the same gap exists: a won quote can only become a service ticket. MSPs that deliver the work as a ConnectWise project have to rebuild the project, its phases, tickets and budget hours by hand after the deal is won.

Who is impacted and how?

This affects Autotask and ConnectWise customers who use Salesbuildr for their entire sales flow but do project-based delivery. Two distinct patterns come up across customer requests:

• MSPs doing larger project work (migrations, network rollouts, infrastructure deployments) where a Proposal Project is prepared during presales and needs to be activated on deal close.

• MSPs doing smaller scoped work (laptop installs, onboarding jobs) who want to use Autotask projects as a lightweight delivery tracker rather than a ticket.

In both cases, the handoff today happens outside Salesbuildr. Sales staff close the deal, then have to go into Autotask or ConnectWise to activate or build the project manually. Thijmen Bosman (Connectworks) specifically flags that this creates a blind spot: won quotes that require follow-up in Autotask can be forgotten after signature, because there is no to-do or delivery tracker left in the sales tool. Eric Knops (Appsys ICT Group) raises a related issue from the presales side: because Salesbuildr has no awareness of existing Proposal Projects on an opportunity, sales staff cannot link a quote to one, which breaks the presales time-logging workflow and cost visibility they rely on.

There is also a flow-level issue: quotes containing service or labor items cannot be closed in Salesbuildr today if project creation is needed, because the post-sale step-through only covers ticket and contract. These quotes get stuck open and require manual handling in Autotask to close the opportunity.

What should happen?

The Won Quote / Won Opportunity flow in Salesbuildr should be extended with a project creation step alongside the existing ticket and contract steps. Concretely:

1. If a Proposal Project is linked to the opportunity in Autotask, the post-sale flow should surface an option to activate it and convert it to a client project, with the sold products on it. Autotask only lets its own wizard create a sales order, so that part stays in Autotask.

2. In ConnectWise, if a project already exists for the opportunity, the sold products should be moved onto it; otherwise the won opportunity should be converted into a new project, with the sold labour as phases and tickets with budget hours.

3. If no Proposal Project exists, the user should be able to create a new project directly from the won quote, with the sold labour as tasks with their hours. Applying a project template (e.g. a standard "new employee onboarding" or "device rollout" project) is not part of this first step.

4. The step should be skippable, consistent with how ticket and contract creation work today.

5. After the project step, the opportunity is updated the same way as after creating a ticket today.

A related improvement: Salesbuildr should show the Proposal Project that is already linked to the opportunity in Autotask on the quote, and preselect it in the post-sale step. Selecting a Proposal Project from within Salesbuildr while creating the quote is a possible later step.