Run your pipeline

The Pipeline is a board of deals, one column per stage, so you can see what is in play for every client at a glance. Its point is not the board though. Its point is the last step: winning a deal creates the delivery project, already carrying what you sold.

The stages

A deal moves through six stages:

Stage	What it means
Lead	Someone might buy. Nothing qualified yet.
Qualified	Real budget, real need, right person.
Proposal	You have put numbers in front of them.
Negotiation	Haggling over scope, price or timing.
Won	Sold. This is where the project appears.
Lost	Gone, with a reason recorded.

Drag a card to move it. The board only offers the moves that make sense from where a deal currently is, so you cannot accidentally drag something from Lead straight to Won and skip the record of how it got there.

Any non-Guest member can open the board and see what is in play. Moving a card, winning a deal, or marking one lost needs Portfolio Manager or above.

Caution

Lost is final. A deal that comes back later is opened as a new one rather than dragged backwards. That keeps your win rate honest: a deal you lost and re-won is two conversations, and a pipeline that quietly un-loses things cannot tell you how often that happens.

Open pipeline, per currency

The header shows your open pipeline: everything still in play, with Won and Lost excluded. Won is excluded because it is no longer a forecast, it is revenue, and margin reports on it. Lost is excluded for the obvious reason.

Every total is shown per currency, never added together. A pipeline worth £143,000 and €90,000 is exactly that. Converting it to one number would make it move with the exchange rate rather than with your sales.

Winning a deal

Steps

1. Open the deal and choose Win and create project.
2. Confirm. Onplana creates the delivery project and moves the deal to Won in a single step.

The project it creates is not an empty shell. It carries:

• the deal value as the project budget, and the deal’s currency;
• the client, linked by identity so the margin report can attribute the work to them even if you rename the company later;
• billable set on, because a won deal is billable work by definition;
• a note that the budget came from a won deal, so months later you can tell a sold number from an estimated one.

The deal’s owner is notified in the app when it is won, since the person who owns a relationship is often not the one who clicked the button. If that is the same person, there is no notification: they were just taken to the new project and know already.

Note

A deal can only be converted once. If two people hit the button at the same moment, one of them wins and the other is told the deal is already converted. The alternative, a firm quietly ending up with two projects for one sale, is the kind of mistake nobody notices until invoicing.

When the client asks for more

Scope change is the services business, so it has somewhere to go. A change request raised against a won deal shows on the client’s page under Renegotiated, next to the asks that simply became delivery work.

That contrast is the useful part. Asks that became work without going through change control are often fine, and sometimes they are unbilled scope. The client page shows both so you can tell which.

Tip

Do not read the middle bucket as an accusation. Most client asks are legitimately in scope. It is a place to look, not a verdict.

Ask the assistant about a client

Clients, contacts and deals are part of what the Onplana assistant can find. Ask “what do we know about Verity” or “which deals mention a retainer” and the answer draws on the client record, its contacts and its deals, with a link to each. A connected agent gets the same through the clients scope of search_org_knowledge.

Two things are deliberate. Only people who can open Clients get client records in an answer: the workspace needs Onplana Services and the person needs the same permission that opens the Clients page, so the assistant can never show a client to someone the page would not. And a contact’s email and phone are not part of what the assistant searches; they stay on the contact, one click away.