Hi
How far can you go with customising the quote. We have a scenerio where we take trade ins, and would like to be able to list these on the quote with a custom negitive value.
Each trade in would be differnt so we couldn’t set these up as products. (I also notice that line items cannot have negitive values)
I have added a custom line item with zero value, then the value of the trade in as a discount amount. While this works we would prefer to have this look a bit more professional
Is this possible to do this, and any suggestion on how we could acheive this
Hey @NCampbell76,
Thanks for posting in the Community!
This is an interesting use case. I’ve been looking for some possible setups in our Community threads and Quote-based knowledge base article, and I came across this particular Community thread:
Line items with trade value
You’ll note that the Accepted solution does mention reflecting trade values as discounts in Quotes, although I’m not sure this fully aligns with your desired outcome. In this case, I’d strongly recommend continuing with your current setup and posting the need for this functionality directly in our Ideas Forum. It would allow others to upvote your idea, expand on it, as well as present the need directly to our Product team. You can also post the URL to your idea in this thread so that we can upvote it!
I hope this helps!
Shane, Senior Community Moderator
So this is a known limitation in HubSpot - negative line items aren’t supported natively and that Ideas thread has been sitting there for a while with no movement. Your zero-value + discount workaround is actually one of the smarter native hacks, but here are a few cleaner options…
First Option - If you’re on Sales Hub Pro or above, you can edit the line items table in your quote template to relabel columns and hide fields on a per-row basis. You could add a custom line item property called “Trade-In Value,” surface it as its own column, and hide the price column for those rows. It won’t calculate natively but it looks a lot more professional than a $0 line item with a discount attached. That said, there are calculated properties on line items now, BUT it can’t feed into the amount as it is read-only.
Next Up - In the quote totals section you can actually relabel the discount field entirely. So instead of showing “Discount” it could read “Trade-In Credit.” This works cleanly if you’re typically dealing with one trade-in per quote… gets messier if there are multiples.
Finally - The cleanest solution for this use case is stepping outside of HubSpot for the customer-facing document. Tools like PandaDoc or Portant both integrate natively with HubSpot, pull your deal and line item data automatically, and let you build a fully custom document template. That means a proper “Trade-Ins” section, true negative values, custom labeling - all of it. The quote still lives in HubSpot for pipeline tracking, the document is just the polished output the customer sees.
Out of curiosity - are you a dealership? We have a custom solution built specifically for dealers that handles DMS functionality and solves a lot of these quoting headaches at the source. Happy to share more if that’s relevant!
Hey @NCampbell76, our app DocuGen can give your quote a proper Trade-Ins section, with each trade-in shown as its own credit instead of a $0 line with a discount. Add deal properties for each trade-in’s description and value, then place them in that section of your quote template, with the minus sign or brackets typed around the value so it reads as a credit. The deal’s line items fill in above it, and the PDF saves to the deal. Unlike PandaDoc, it’s all generated from the deal without leaving HubSpot.
You’ll find DocuGen on the HubSpot marketplace.
P.S. The free plan covers 400 documents a month with no watermark, and unlimited users so your whole sales team gets on at no cost.