The sales pipeline

Business-Gym gives you two sales surfaces: Pipeline, a board of your deals grouped by stage, and Sales analytics, the funnel and forecast computed over those same deals. The board is also where you create and move deals, which is covered in Create and manage deals.

One distinction runs through this page: a deal held in the built-in CRM changes when you change it, while a deal projected from an outside CRM is read-only here and proposes its moves for approval. Which one you have depends on your workspace, and for most workspaces every deal is the first kind.

Where do I find the pipeline?

Both pages sit under Sales in the left navigation, alongside Customers, Quotes and Revenue. The board is Pipeline and the numbers are Sales analytics — the same set of deals, shown two ways.

The board lays out one column per stage, in the order lead → qualified → proposal → negotiation → won → lost. Every stage column is shown even when it is empty, so you always see the full shape of the pipeline. If your deals use stages of their own, those columns appear after the standard six.

Each column header carries its own count and total value, and a row above the board shows the whole pipeline as “12 deals · €480,000” with a source mix beside it — how many deals are native to Business-Gym and how many came from your CRM.

What does a deal card show you?

The deal name, its value, the chance of winning, the owner and the close date — plus a badge saying where the deal came from. A card shows a dash rather than a fabricated figure when a number is missing.

• Value — the amount in euros, or ”—” when the deal has no amount recorded.
• Probability — shown as “40% to win” when your CRM carries one, and omitted when it does not.
• Owner — the head that owns the deal, or “Unassigned”.
• Source badge — Native for a deal mastered in Business-Gym, CRM for one projected from Dynamics.
• A deep link back to the record — an “Open in …” link to the original in your CRM, shown on CRM-sourced deals when the connection’s address is configured.

Native and CRM-sourced deals render identically otherwise. You look at one pipeline, not two.

Note

An empty board says “No deals yet” and explains that deals appear once they are created or synced. It does not show a demo pipeline or placeholder numbers.

How does a deal move from stage to stage?

It depends on who masters the deal, and the board makes the two cases behave differently on purpose.

A deal held in the built-in CRM moves. Pick a stage from the control on the card, or drag the card into another column, and the change applies at once and is written to the audit trail. There is no proposal and nothing to approve. Dragging is available only on these cards, and only to someone whose role permits a move; the stage control does the same job from a keyboard or a screen reader.

A deal projected from an outside CRM proposes. Picking a target stage creates a proposal rather than moving the deal. The control changes to “Proposed · pending approval ↗” and the card gains a warning badge reading “Pending approval → proposal” that links straight to your approvals queue. Choosing a different target before anyone decides updates the same proposal rather than piling up a second one, and picking the stage the deal is already on does nothing at all.

How a stage change behaves in Business-Gym, by who holds the master copy. A deal of your own moves when you move it. A deal an outside CRM masters is read-only here, so a stage change becomes a proposal, a person decides it in the approvals queue, and the write back to that CRM is the step that does not complete today.

Creating, editing and moving a deal needs the approver, admin or owner role; archiving one needs admin or owner. A read-only member sees the whole board and changes none of it. See Create and manage deals for the full table.

What happens when I approve a stage change?

This question applies only to a deal an outside CRM masters — a deal of your own never needs an approval, so there is nothing to approve.

Your decision is recorded, the proposal closes, and the deal’s pending badge clears — but the write to that CRM record does not happen. The live write path is switched off in the product, so an approved stage advance is a no-op against the system of record.

Caution

For a deal an outside CRM masters, do not treat an approved stage move as a CRM update. Until the live write path is enabled, change the stage in Dynamics yourself; the next sync will bring the new stage back into Business-Gym. A deal of your own is not affected — moving it here is the change.

This is deliberate rather than broken. External writes sit on the hard floor described in autonomy and the hard floor: the approval gate is built and enforced first, and the write is wired only when a person switches it on. Moving a deal to won or lost is classified as money-committing and stays human-decided permanently — there is no confidence level at which it becomes automatic.

Stage proposals land in the same place as everything else that needs you. See working the queue for how to review and decide them.

Where do the deals come from?

Note

This section describes a connected workspace, where an external CRM is the system of record. If your records live in the built-in CRM — which is the normal case, see Where does your CRM data live? — your deals are held by Business-Gym directly and none of the sync conditions below apply to you.

Where an external CRM is the master, deals reach the board as read-only projections synced from Microsoft Dynamics, refreshed on a schedule roughly every two hours. The sync pulls those open opportunities and mirrors them into Business-Gym; it never writes back.

Two conditions gate it, and both fail quietly and honestly rather than inventing data:

• Your opportunity records must be bound to Dynamics as their system of record. If Business-Gym is the master for opportunities, there is nothing to project and the sync does nothing.
• Dynamics must be connected. With no connection configured, the sync is a no-op — it does not fabricate deals to fill the board.

One run projects up to 500 open opportunities. If you have more than that, the run reports itself as truncated instead of silently showing you a partial pipeline as if it were the whole one.

Deals that arrive this way are created in that CRM, not here. Deals of your own are created on the board — see Create and manage deals — and integrations lists what each connector reads.

What do the analytics numbers mean?

Sales analytics computes four headline figures over the same deals on the board, then breaks them down by head and by legal entity. Each is calculated on read, so it always matches what the board shows.

• Open pipeline — the total value of deals still open.
• Weighted forecast — each open deal’s amount multiplied by its win probability, summed. A deal with no probability contributes nothing rather than its full value.
• Win rate — won divided by won plus lost, over closed deals only. It shows ”—” until something has actually closed, never 0%.
• Avg. cycle — the mean number of days from creation to close across won deals. ”—” when no won deal has a close date.

Below the KPIs, Funnel by stage shows the count and value sitting in each stage, and two roll-up panels break the pipeline down By Head and By entity — useful if you run more than one company.

What is not available yet?

The board and the analytics are live; the write half of the loop is not. Here is the honest split, so you can plan around it.

• Pipeline board, deal cards, stage columns and totals — live.
• Sales analytics: funnel, win rate, forecast, cycle time, by-head and by-entity roll-ups — live.
• Dynamics opportunity sync (read-only, roughly two-hourly) — live.
• Creating, editing and moving a deal of your own — live, and applied at once rather than proposed.
• Drag-and-drop between columns — live, for deals held in the built-in CRM.
• Archiving a deal (admin or owner; the record stays and leaves the pipeline) — live.
• Stage-change proposals and the pending-approval badge, for deals an outside CRM masters — live.
• The write back to an outside CRM after you approve — not available yet. Your decision is recorded; that record is not changed.
• A per-deal detail page — not available. A deal of your own opens in an edit form; a projected one deep-links to Dynamics.

Where Business-Gym is not the system of record it proposes and a person disposes, which is the same posture as the rest of the platform. See the inbound → approve → execute loop for how that works everywhere else, or the glossary for the terms used above.