Sales: customers and estimates

Manage customers and contacts, move deals forward, write estimates, and who sees the money.

People with the sales role and administrators can register customers, create a project at the inquiry stage and follow it through estimates to the order.

Customers

“Customers” in the sidebar holds client companies and their contacts. It is separate from the group and partner companies under Organization.

“Add customer” creates one from its name and industry. Use “Edit” on its page for address, phone, payment terms, where to send invoices, website and notes
“Add contact” registers people at the customer (name, department or title, email, phone). One can be the main contact
The customer page lists its projects and estimates. Lost deals stay there for later analysis
A customer with projects can’t be deleted

Each customer belongs to the group company that deals with it. Sales handle only their own company’s customers.

Who	Customers
Group admin	See and edit all
Company admin, sales	See and edit their company’s
Accounting	See their company’s
PMO	See all
Everyone else, partners	None

Move a deal forward

Under “Projects”, press “New project”, set the stage to “Inquiry” and pick the customer. You can also enter an expected amount and probability
Use “Edit” on the “Overview” tab to update the probability, next action and its date, and the sales owner
Drag the card along the pipeline: Proposal, then Negotiation
Marking an estimate as won moves the project to “Won” automatically

If you lose the deal, set the stage to “Lost” and record the reason and competitor. Lost and on-hold projects move to the “Closed / archived” tab and stay out of the usual lists.

See Projects for what each stage means and who can see it.

Deal notes

A project’s “Deal notes” tab keeps a log of meetings, calls and emails. Enter the date, participants and notes and press “Save note”; notes are listed newest first.

A “Next action” becomes a task with an assignee and due date. It goes to the assignee’s own tasks, and the project’s next action (shown on the pipeline card) follows the latest one. Without an assignee, it is yours.

Mark the action done by completing the task in the task list or the dashboard; the note shows it as done
The right side shows the deal’s next action and the actions still open
Deleting a note keeps its task

Sales, administrators and project members with write access write deal notes. Partner (BP) users do not see them.

Estimates

Write estimates on a project’s “Estimates” tab. A project can have several: additional work after the first build and maintenance renewals are added as new estimates of the same project. Each one is won or lost on its own.

Field	Description
Estimate	Its name, such as “Initial build (v3)”
Kind	Initial build, additional work, maintenance or other
Status	Draft, submitted, won or lost. Won and lost record the date
Billing	One-time or monthly. Use monthly for maintenance
Amount	Excluding tax. For monthly billing, one month
Issued, due, contract ends	Optional
Breakdown	Work, person, effort (person-days) and unit cost. Pick a person and leave the unit cost empty to use theirs

With a breakdown, effort is the sum of its rows, and cost (effort × unit cost) and margin are calculated. Without one, enter the effort directly.

Unit costs in a breakdown are kept as they were when saved: changing a user’s unit cost later doesn’t rewrite old estimates.

Who sees the money

Information	Sales, administrators, accounting	Employees on the project	Partner (BP) users
Estimate amount, effort, margin	Yes	Yes	No
Per-person unit cost and cost	Yes	No	No
Customer, stage, order amount	Yes	Yes	No
Tasks and vulnerabilities (their projects)	Yes	Yes	Yes

Employees see amounts because knowing them helps their careers. Per-person unit costs would reveal salaries, so only sales, administrators and accounting of the same company see them.

After the order, plan how the estimate is billed in Invoices and payments.

Sales (for their own company) and administrators create and edit estimates. Set unit costs under “Organization” → “Users” (Users and permissions).