Create and manage deals

You create a deal with ”+ New deal” on the Pipeline board, or from the Deals tab of a company page. Only the deal name is strictly required. A deal you hold in the built-in CRM is yours to move, edit and archive straight away — no approval step stands in between.

How do I create a deal?

Two places, and the second saves you a field:

• Pipeline — ”+ New deal”. On a board with no deals yet, the invitation is “Create your first deal” rather than an empty grid.
• A company page → Deals tab — the same form with that company already chosen, so a deal you raise while looking at a customer is attached to them from the start.

The form asks for the deal name, the company, the main contact — one of that company’s own contacts, not a free-text name — the offering, the value and its currency, the stage, the expected close date, the probability of winning, and any notes.

Only the name is required to save. The rest is checked when you do fill it in: the value must be a number, the currency a three-letter code, the probability a percentage, and the close date a real date. A field you leave blank stays genuinely empty — it is not quietly turned into a zero.

What happens when I move a deal between stages?

For a deal held in the built-in CRM, the move happens. There is no proposal and nothing to approve: your change applies at once and is written to the audit trail, so it can be read back later.

You can move a deal two ways, and they do the same thing:

• the stage control on the deal, which works from a keyboard and with a screen reader;
• dragging the card into another column.

Only cards from the built-in CRM are draggable, and only for someone whose role allows a move. If somebody else moves the same deal while you are looking at a stale board, your move does not overwrite theirs — it is applied against the stage you saw, so a conflicting move does not land silently.

Note

This is a real change from how the board used to work. Every stage change was once a proposal that waited in the approvals queue, because the only deals on the board had come from an outside CRM. For a deal of your own, that detour is gone.

What does moving a deal to won or lost do?

It marks the deal won or lost, and the pipeline tile on Overview counts it that way — open, won and lost, with the value of the open ones.

Moving a deal to lost in the deal form also asks why, and keeps that reason on the deal. The stage control and dragging a card do not ask; open Edit afterwards to add the reason. If you later move the same deal out of lost, the reason is cleared rather than kept against a deal that is no longer lost. A stale reason would be worse than none, because it would read as current.

Who can do what to a deal?

Three rights, drawn at different places, and enforced where the write happens rather than only on the buttons:

Action	Approver	Admin or owner	Read-only member
See the board and every deal	✅	✅	✅
Create, edit and move a deal	✅	✅	❌
Archive a deal	❌	✅	❌

A read-only member reads the whole pipeline and changes none of it. Reading every deal in the workspace and writing one are different rights, and only the second needs the approver role.

Archiving is narrower than editing on purpose. Moving a deal is everyday sales work; taking one out of the pipeline changes what everybody else’s numbers are computed over.

Does archiving delete the deal?

No, and there is no delete button for a deal anywhere. Archive sets the deal’s status to archived so it leaves the pipeline and stops counting towards your totals. The record stays, with its history.

Archiving the same deal twice counts as one archive, so a double click or a retried request cannot produce a second event in the audit trail.

Why is a deal from another CRM read-only here?

Because Business-Gym is not that deal’s system of record. Where an outside CRM holds the master copy, the deal you see here is a projection of it, and writing to the projection would be writing to a copy that the next sync overwrites.

Such a deal tells you so in as many words — “This deal is kept in an outside CRM and is read-only here. Open it there to change it.” — and keeps its “Open in Dynamics” link so you can go and do exactly that. Its stage control still works, but it proposes the move for approval rather than applying it, which is the behaviour the whole board once had.

Which record types your workspace masters is covered in Where does your CRM data live?. For most workspaces the answer is Business-Gym for all of them, and nothing on this page needs a connection.

Where do I see the pipeline as a whole?

On the Pipeline board and on Sales analytics — the funnel, win rate, weighted forecast and average cycle length computed over these same deals. Both are described in The sales pipeline.