Which Drawings Print on Which Document

Control exactly which drawings land on each generated PDF, stop blank back pages, and know that unticking a drawing now sticks on the copy your customer receives.

Written By Dennis Rodin

Last updated 7 days ago

Every generated PDF can carry the order's drawings, but each document treats them differently, and the controls live on three separate screens. This article covers all of them: where a drawing has to come from before it can print, how to stop a blank back page, how to remove a back drawing for good, and what the picker does when you generate a document.

What can go on a document

Any image attached to the quote or the order can now be placed on a document, whatever document type it was filed under. Three kinds turn up:

  • Sketch pages built in Step 4: Sketch & Inscription. Saving the sketch writes one image per side, a front page and a back page, and hangs them off the quote.

  • Files you uploaded with the type Drawing in Notes & Files.

Any other image on the order is now offered as well — a photo of the existing headstone, a shot of the lot, or the Cemetery Location Map MonuDesk saves when you pin the plot on the cemetery step. You no longer have to re-upload a reference photo as a Drawing to get it onto a document.

It still has to be a raster image: JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or HEIF. A file you uploaded as PDF, DXF, BMP, AI or PLT stays on the order for your team, but it is not offered in the picker and never prints.

Only your newest save per side is used. Each time you save the sketch, MonuDesk writes a fresh pair of images rather than overwriting the old ones, so historic approvals still point at what was approved. The picker and the PDFs take only the newest front and the newest back, which is why saving the sketch five times does not put five copies of the same drawing on the contract.

Stopping a blank back page

The control is the Include back drawing switch, top right of the Sketch Builder card in Step 4: Sketch & Inscription. Hovering it reads: "When off, an empty back page is not saved or printed with the sketch. A back with content is always saved."

Here is the rule that explains the blank page dealers keep seeing. The stone outline you place on the canvas is drawn on both sides, so rendering the back always produces a picture, even on an order where nobody drew a back. That picture is not blank in any technical sense, so it used to be saved and attached to every document as a near-empty page.

The switch and the save now judge the back on its own content: text or shapes you added to the back side specifically. So:

  • The back has real content — it is always saved and printed, whatever the switch says. The switch can never drop work you did.

  • The back has only the shared stone outline, and the switch is off — no back page is saved and none prints.

  • The back has only the shared outline, and the switch is on — you get the back page, which is what you want when the back really is meant to be plain.

The switch is saved on the order, so the choice sticks between visits. Once you turn it off, the back drawing is also skipped on every document that is generated afterwards.

Deleting a back drawing for good

Turning the switch off stops a blank back page. Deleting removes a back drawing that was genuinely drawn and is no longer wanted.

  1. Go to Review & Create, the last step of the wizard.

  2. Find the Sketch card. When the order has a real back drawing you get two panels, Front Side and Back Side.

  3. Click Delete in the Back Side panel header.

The confirmation reads Delete the back drawing? — "This permanently deletes the back side of the sketch and removes it from the invoice, quote, contract, receipt and shop ticket. The front side is not affected. This cannot be undone." Confirm with Delete Back Drawing.

Two things to know about what that actually does. It removes every saved revision of the back drawing, not just the one on screen — otherwise the next-oldest save would simply be promoted onto your next document. And it turns the Include back drawing switch off in the same move, so a later sketch save does not quietly put an empty back page back.

An approved drawing cannot be deleted. If a customer has already approved a drawing that includes this back side you get: "The customer has already approved a drawing that includes this back side, so it cannot be deleted. Withdraw that approval first, then delete the back drawing." The approval record is what proves what the family signed off on, so MonuDesk refuses rather than destroy it. If the family wants a different back, draw or upload a new version and have them approve that one instead.

If you remember a Back Side panel appearing on Review & Create for orders where nobody ever drew a back, that was the same shared-outline effect. The panel now appears only when the back carries content of its own and you have not switched it off, so a front-only order shows a single full-width Front Side panel and nothing else. If you expected a Back Side panel and there is none, the back is genuinely empty.

The drawing picker

Open an order, click Document Generation at the top right, and choose Generate Quote, Generate Invoice, Generate Shop Ticket, Generate Receipt or Generate Contract. A Select images panel appears with a thumbnail of every image on the order — sketch pages, uploaded drawings and reference photos alike. The subtitle spells out the deal: "Only the selected images are included on the [document]." Click a thumbnail to tick or untick it, then click Generate.

The picker only asks when there is a choice to make. With one image or none, MonuDesk skips the dialog and generates straight away, and that single image is included. Note that the count is now every image on the order, so an order with one drawing plus a cemetery location map does open the picker.

Defaults differ by document, and this is the part that surprises people:

  • Quote, Invoice, Receipt, Contract and Shop Ticket: sketch pages and files typed Drawing start ticked. Reference photos and every other image are listed but start unticked, so opening the picker up to them did not change what your documents have always printed — you tick what you want to add. There is no limit, but you cannot untick everything: leave nothing selected and you get "Select at least one image to include."

  • The one exception: on an order with no sketch and no Drawing-typed file, whatever images it does have start ticked instead, so the picker never opens with nothing selected.

  • Purchase Order and Foundation Order: nothing starts ticked, and the cap is two. The panel says "Maximum 2 images per document." and trying to add a third gives a Limit reached message. Those two documents are laid out for at most two drawings, so pick the ones the vendor actually needs.

If the order has no eligible images, the picker shows "Upload a drawing or reference image in Notes & Files to include it here." That now only means the file you had in mind is not a raster image — a PDF or a DXF, for example.

Documents MonuDesk generates for you carry drawings only. The quote or invoice created automatically when you create or confirm an order, and the copy that goes to QuickBooks, take sketch pages and Drawing-typed files and nothing else. A reference photo reaches a document only when you tick it in the picker and generate that document yourself. The cemetery location map is the one exception: the shop ticket and the foundation order print it automatically, in its own Cemetery location section.

Unticking a drawing now sticks

This is the most consequential change in this release, because it decides what your customer sees.

Generating a document does two things: it downloads a PDF to your computer, and it saves a copy on the order under Notes & Files. That saved copy is the one that matters afterwards — it is what a customer can open, what goes out as an email attachment, and what reaches QuickBooks.

Your picker choice now applies to both. Untick the back drawing on a contract and the stored contract has no back drawing either. Previously the stored copy re-derived its own list of drawings and could disagree with the file you had just downloaded, which is how a drawing you deliberately left off still reached the customer.

The rule holds even at the edges: if everything you picked turns out to be unprintable, the stored copy stays drawing-free rather than falling back to the automatic list. Your choice is respected, not second-guessed.

Regenerate to correct a document. There is no way to change the images on a document that already exists. Generate it again with the right ones ticked. For a quote, invoice or contract the new copy now replaces the old one: the earlier file is removed from the order once the new one is safely stored, and the replacement is labelled with its version, so the second copy reads V2 ahead of the document name and the third V3. The first generation is unmarked. Nothing to clean up, and a customer can no longer open a superseded quote in the portal. Receipts, shop tickets and purchase orders still stack, because an order legitimately has several of each — delete the earlier copy from Notes & Files yourself.

Blank and duplicate pages are dropped

Two clean-ups run on every document, whether you picked the drawings or MonuDesk chose them. A blank image never prints — older orders still carry near-empty back pages saved before the rules above existed, and they are detected and skipped even when you tick them, so no wasted sheet comes out of the printer. And repeat saves of the same drawing collapse into one, so a sketch you saved a dozen times prints once.

How each document lays drawings out

  • Contract and Quote: each drawing gets a full page of its own, headed Front Drawing, Back Drawing, or Drawing 1 of 3 for uploads that are not sketch sides. There is still exactly one signature line, on the last drawing page — a page split must not turn one signature into one per drawing. Past four drawings the full-page layout would turn a two-page contract into a booklet, so it falls back to the compact stacked layout below.

  • Invoice and Receipt: drawings sit inline under the line items. One drawing prints full width, two print side by side, three or more stack down the page, moving to a new page when they run out of room.

  • Shop Ticket: a single drawing is scaled up to fill most of a page so the shop floor can read it, moving to its own page when there is not enough room left. Several drawings stack. Sketch pages and uploaded drawings are treated the same.

  • Purchase Order and Foundation Order: one drawing prints full width, two print side by side. That is the whole reason for the two-drawing cap.

If something looks wrong

  • A blank page prints at the end of the contract. The order has an old back-side image saved before the current rules. Turn Include back drawing off in Step 4, or delete the back drawing from Review & Create, then generate the document again.

  • The same drawing prints twice. You have both a sketch page and a separate upload of the same design. Untick one of them in the picker.

  • A drawing I unticked still reached the customer. The document was generated before this release. Generate it again with the right drawings ticked, then delete the earlier copy from Notes & Files; the stored copy now follows your choice.

  • My file is not in the picker. Document type no longer matters — but it still has to be a raster image (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, HEIF). A PDF, DXF, BMP, AI or PLT is never offered. Save it as an image and upload it again in Notes & Files.

  • A reference photo did not print. Reference photos start unticked. Open Document Generation, tick it under Select images, and generate the document again. The cemetery location map is different: the shop ticket and the foundation order print it automatically in its own Cemetery location section.

  • The picker never opened. The order has one image or none, so there was nothing to choose. The document generated straight away with whatever was there.

  • The Delete button on the Back Side panel does nothing but warn. A customer has approved a drawing that includes that back side. Withdraw the approval first.

  • The back drawing is back after I deleted it. Reopen Step 4: Sketch & Inscription and save the sketch once. The deletion clears the saved images immediately, and saving finishes clearing it from the canvas the editor reloads from.

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