Customers, quotes and offerings
Business-Gym keeps three commercial records of its own — customers, offerings and quotes — and they are real, editable records in the product, not read-only mirrors of your CRM. You build a quote from your catalog, stage it for a person to approve, and can generate a draft contract from it.
The connection to Microsoft Dynamics is where the honest limits sit: reads are live, exactly one write is live, and everything else stages an approval that does not complete today. This page marks which is which.
Where do customers, offerings and quotes live?
Section titled “Where do customers, offerings and quotes live?”They sit in two groups of the left-hand navigation. Customers, Quotes, Revenue, Pipeline and Sales analytics are grouped under Sales. Offerings — your catalog of what the business sells — sits under Build, next to your Knowledge Base.
Every list starts genuinely empty in a new workspace and shows an empty state rather than sample data. Creating and editing these records is owner and admin only; other members can read them.
What does Business-Gym read from your CRM?
Section titled “What does Business-Gym read from your CRM?”It reads customers, contacts and opportunities from Microsoft Dynamics, and those reads are live. A customer that came from Dynamics carries a CRM reference, a “Synced from” badge and an Open in CRM link back to the source record.
On a Dynamics-linked customer, Deep-dive in CRM pulls the live record on demand — not on page load, because the round trip is slow. The panel labels what it got: Live, Not connected, Not in CRM, or CRM unreachable. If the read fails it shows nothing rather than stale data.
Open opportunities sync into the Pipeline board as thin projections, so Dynamics deals and native deals appear on one board. That sync runs only when your opportunity system of record is set to Dynamics and the connector is configured; otherwise it is an honest no-op that reports why it did nothing. See Integrations for what each connector is scoped to.
How do you build and send a quote?
Section titled “How do you build and send a quote?”You create a draft quote against a customer, add lines from your offerings catalog or as custom lines, and the totals recompute on the server as you edit. A quote moves through Draft, Awaiting approval, Sent, and then Accepted, Declined or Expired.
Send for approval does not send. It stages a pending approval carrying the rendered quote and moves the quote to Awaiting approval. A person approves it in your queue, and only then does the quote become Sent. See Working the queue for how that decision is made.
Generate contract creates a draft contract from a quote, copying the customer, owner, value and line items. It is one contract per quote, and it is a draft you refine — not a signed agreement.
What can an inbound message turn into here?
Section titled “What can an inbound message turn into here?”An inbound item can become a CRM lead or a draft quote, and both start as proposals rather than finished work. This is the commercial end of the inbound → approve → execute loop.
Create CRM lead stages an approval. When a person approves it, Business-Gym either links an existing Dynamics record it matched while staging, or writes one lead owned by the Sales Head. This is the single live write into your CRM, it happens only on that explicit approval, and it exists only when Dynamics is configured — with no connector, nothing happens and no record id is invented.
Draft quote on a quote-request item creates a real draft quote: it resolves or creates the customer from the sender, sets the owner to the routed head, and copies the subject into the notes. It never sends. You can see both actions in context in the inbound triage cockpit.
Can it update a record in your CRM?
Section titled “Can it update a record in your CRM?”Not today, and this is the limit worth knowing before you plan around it. A proposed customer-field change and a proposed pipeline-stage move both stage an approval carrying the change — and the live write path to Dynamics is off by default. Even an approved change is a no-op until someone deliberately enables that path.
On the Pipeline board, Move to… on a deal card proposes the move and the card then reads “Pending approval”. The deal does not move in Dynamics.
Customer-field write-back exists as a governed, approval-staging path behind the API only. There is no button for it on the customer screen today, so treat Dynamics as read-plus-one-lead-write. That posture is deliberate — see Autonomy and the hard floor.
Which system owns each record?
Section titled “Which system owns each record?”You choose per record type on the Integrations page, in the CRM System of Record card. Customers and Offerings can each be set to Business-Gym (native) or Dynamics 365.
Choosing Dynamics records your intent. The card says so plainly: the live bridge activates once the Dynamics connector is configured for your environment, so the setting on its own does not move data.
What is not built yet?
Section titled “What is not built yet?”Several tabs are visible but deliberately empty, and they tell you so with “Available in a later phase.” Nothing behind them is silently broken — it simply has not shipped.
- Customer detail — the Commercial and Memory tabs are placeholders. Overview, Contacts and Projects work.
- Offering detail — Pricing and Revenue are placeholders. Where used works and lists the projects delivering that offering.
- Quote delivery — the customer email behind an approved send.
- CRM write-back — staged and gated, but the live write path is off.
Next: see how the approval decision itself works in Working the queue, or what each connector reads in Integrations.