From a phone call to a sales order

An aluminium workshop rings asking about racking. It becomes a deal worth 24,000, then a customer record, then a quotation for 27,600, then a confirmed sales order.

1. 1.The board is columns, a column is a stage, and every stage carries odds. The stage names are Arabic because they are your data rather than a translation inside the software: rename them to whatever your team actually says, and change the percentages to match your own record.
2. 2.Weighted is not the sum of the deals: it is each deal times its stage’s odds, rounded once per deal rather than once at the end — so the figure agrees with the sum of the rows beneath it. Won and lost deals are left out entirely, because what has closed has no odds left.
3. 3.This caller is not a customer on file: no record, no tax number, just a name and a mobile. That is what the New lead tab is for — the deal opens on what we know now, rather than on a record we would have to invent before knowing whether he will buy at all.
4. 4.The title is what you will read on the card two months from now, and it is also the description that will travel word for word onto the quotation’s line. Write it the way you would explain it to a colleague, not “Deal 14”.
5. 5.A deal has to be with somebody. The system refuses one with neither a customer nor a name, because a pipeline of deals with nobody attached is a list of wishes rather than a list of work.
6. 6.The value before tax. The tax is not your revenue — you collect it for the state — so putting it in the pipeline inflates the forecast by fifteen per cent and makes every comparison with actual sales wrong.
7. 7.Added at the first open stage, and the log wrote its own first line. From here on everything that happens to this deal has a line: who called, when it moved, and who moved it.
8. 8.We move it to the quotation stage. The move writes its own “stage change” line in the log, and you cannot type that line by hand — the system refuses it outright — because a line claiming a move that never happened poisons every report built on stage dates. The weighted figure jumps from 2,400 to 12,000, because the odds are now 50%.
9. 9.A quotation is a document to a named party, so the deal needs a customer record first. The button builds one out of the lead’s own details — name, mobile, email — and keeps those details as they were typed: if the customer record is archived later, the deal still says who it was with.
10. 10.Be fair to this button: it does not write you a finished quotation. It creates one with a single line carrying the deal’s title and its whole value, at the tax rate set in the CRM settings. A starting point, not a finished document — you open it afterwards and break it into real lines if you need to.
11. 11.24,000 net, 3,600 tax, 27,600 in total — by the same functions that total any invoice in the product, not a second implementation kept for quotations. And because the line carries no stock item it is a service line: nothing ships, and the system will not ask you which warehouse it leaves from.
12. 12.Confirming takes the order number, and the quote number stays on the record — so the path from quotation to order is always readable. This button is not the only way in: the customer can accept the quotation from their own page, and that acceptance runs through the very same function and produces the very same order with the very same number.
13. 13.One last thing, and it is the most misunderstood: nothing has happened in the books. A confirmed order is a mutual promise, not a sale — no entry, no receivable, no tax payable. Stock moves on delivery and the ledger moves on the invoice, and both of those are a later step than this one.