Both sides see the terms before they answer

A while ago we made a payment plan survive the counter, so an offer made on a plan came back answered as a plan. That fixed our side of the conversation. Your side still had a single box asking for a number.

Now it says what it is about to send. Open a counter and the plan it will carry is stated above the field: eighteen months, twenty percent down, or whatever the two of you have arrived at. If the deal has no plan and the counter is a single payment, it says that too — silence there is its own kind of wrong answer, especially if you had asked to pay monthly and the shape of the deal has since changed.

The field itself is also labelled honestly. It used to ask for "the total amount you want to propose", which is a fair thing to read as everything I will pay. It is not. It is the price the schedule is built from, and a plan collects a little more than that because it carries a service fee. So the word "total" is gone, and the note above the field says which number you are looking at.

The terms that carry are the last ones agreed, not the ones from the very first offer. That sounds obvious, and it was not true before: every counter quietly reset the schedule back to whatever the opening offer said. If we restructured a deal halfway through — moved it off a plan, or onto a longer one — the next counter put it back, and neither of us was told. Now the live terms are the ones you both last saw, and they stay that way until somebody changes them on purpose.

One smaller thing, in the same spirit. If the terms move while you are typing — we send a counter in the same minute you were writing one — your counter is not sent under the new shape as though nothing happened. You are told the terms changed and shown the current ones, and you decide again.

And on the rare occasion we cannot read the plan at all, because something on our side is having a moment, the form tells you so in as many words. You can still send your counter — we would rather not lock you out of a negotiation over a hiccup of ours — but you send it knowing we could not confirm the schedule, instead of reading an empty space as there isn't one. That is the whole idea, really: the form would rather admit what it does not know than let you infer something comfortable and wrong.