Clients and deals

A company lives in Companies, one of the tabs on /app/sales. Its own page shows a status, the people who work there, the projects that came from it, and the deals in flight. The status is one of four: Prospect ("Not a customer yet"), Warm ("Talking, nothing signed"), Active ("Work is running"), or Dormant ("Quiet for now, not gone").

That status is set by hand, with four buttons on the company's page, and nothing else ever moves it, with one exception below. Only a person knows whether a client who has gone quiet for six months is dormant on purpose or between budget rounds. Kadrenta records who set a status and when.

The one automatic move: a dormant company that gets a new deal opened on it becomes active again immediately. A dormant company with a live deal on the board is a contradiction the product does not leave standing.

There is a second nudge, and it is still not automatic. The moment you mark a deal won, if the company behind it is not a customer yet, a line appears on the deal: "<company> is not marked as a customer yet", with one button to fix it. Saying no costs nothing. There is no popup, no dismiss to remember, and the line stops appearing once the company is Active. A won deal might be a one-off job, so the question stays a suggestion and never a side effect.

The people who work at a company are a separate, small table under it: name, role, who is primary. That is not the same list as the studio's own address book. Contacts, in the top bar, is everybody the studio knows: colleagues, freelancers, and the people at every client, all in one place. A company's own People section is that same address book filtered down to the people who work there. A person is not a sales record; you can keep a freelancer on file between jobs, long before or after any company relationship exists.

Before there is a deal, a promising company shows up on Approach: companies you mean to talk to, still a Prospect or Warm, with nobody in the pipeline for them yet. Each row can carry an owner (whose company this is, while you are chasing it) and a next-step date, the same two ideas a deal carries, so the two screens agree about what "overdue" means.

Deleting a company only works while no deal points at it, and its people are never deleted along with it. They stay in the address book, because they belong to the studio and not to one client.

Funnel, the first tab on /app/sales, is a kanban board. Each column is a stage a deal can be in: Inquiry, Pitch, Info requested, Quote sent, Awaiting reply, Won, Lost. A deal moves left to right either by dragging its card or with the arrows on the card itself. The two ends, Won and Lost, always ask first, with a popup in front of them.

A deal's own page carries the fields you would expect from a card that represents real work: a Deal name, an Owner (whose deal this is, a caption on the card, never a lock on who can open it), a Priority on the same five-step scale tasks use (Critical, High, Normal, Low, Someday), a Next step on date, and Notes, the box for "where it came from, what they want, what was agreed." Two more fields, Value and Cost, only appear for people with the sales permission. Someone without it never even sees an empty box where a figure should be, because a field that is merely greyed out still says there is a number here that is not yours.

A deal that is won or lost is not deleted or hidden. It stays a row in the funnel, along with the whole history of which stage it passed through and when, so a deal that fell through can always be told apart from one that never existed and a conversion rate can be calculated.

The My deals toggle above the board narrows the view to what is yours. When you cannot edit deals at all, the board still shows you everything. You cannot drag a card, and the page says so: "Read-only, deals are not yours to move."

Not every studio wants all seven columns. A Stages menu sits above the funnel (for whoever holds the studio settings permission) with a tick beside every stage. Three of them, Inquiry, Won and Lost, are shown ticked and cannot be moved. An entrance and two outcomes are not optional steps; they are what makes a funnel a funnel. The other four, Pitch, Info requested, Quote sent and Awaiting reply, can each be switched off. Out of the box only Pitch and Quote sent are on.

The rule behind the default, in the product's own words above the menu: "A stage earns a column when there is work in it." Quote sent already tells you to chase it, so Awaiting reply does not add anything beyond a second drag. Pitch stays on because something with a real outcome happens there: a moodboard gets built.

Switching a stage off does not touch the deals already sitting in it, and the menu itself says so: "Switching one off leaves its deals where they are." The column turns grey and stops accepting anything new. You can still drag a deal out of it, but nothing can be dropped in, on the server as well as on screen, so this is not only a matter of hiding a button. Once the last deal leaves a switched-off column, it disappears from the board entirely, until someone ticks it back on.

Dragging a card into Won, or pressing the button on the deal page, opens a popup: "Won, make it a project?" Everything in it is already filled in from the deal, and you have two ways through it:

• Accept the win without a project. The deal is marked won and nothing else happens. Good for the kind of win that does not need a project of its own.
• Create the project. A full form: project name, status, deadline, who leads it, who else is on the team, all prefilled from the deal and yours to change.

If you do not hold the permission to start a project, the popup only offers the first option, and says so: "Starting a project is not one of your switches, so this popup only records the win. Ask an admin to start the job."

A deal that has already produced a project can be marked won again and still offer to make another one, because a big win can be more than one job. Pressing Won a second time on an already-won deal does not ask anything again. The question only appears the moment a deal arrives at that stage.

However you get there (the Won popup, a Make this a project button on the deal's own page for a deal that is already won, or Start from a deal when starting a new project), there is exactly one door underneath all three. So the answer to "what came out of this deal" can never depend on which button you happened to press.

Three things happen when a deal becomes a project:

• A project appears, carrying a reference back to the deal it came from.
• The deal's contacts move along to the project's own contact list, the people who get review updates. Not to the project's team; they get no access to anything.
• Any moodboard already hanging on the deal moves with it, rather than being copied. A board that already moved to an earlier project on the same deal stays where it is. Only a board still sitting on the deal itself follows this one across.

Two things do not happen. The deal's stage does not change on conversion. Winning is a judgement and converting is a separate action, so a won deal that later gets a second project does not re-count as a second win. And the deal's notes do not become the project's briefing. Notes are the internal shorthand ("they wanted 15% off"), and a briefing is something you would show someone.

Whoever converts the deal becomes the project's owner, and its lead by default. Name somebody else to run it and the popup's own words explain the split: "You own this project because you closed the deal. A team needs a lead, and that does not have to be you." A lost deal refuses conversion outright.

Dragging a card into Lost, or pressing the equivalent button, asks first too: "Mark this deal lost?" The popup tells you what that costs: "It is not deleted: the deal, its people and its history stay, so the conversion figures still add up. You will find it under Archive in the studio settings, and you can bring it back, or move it to Awaiting reply if the client calls after all." A lost deal is filed into the archive automatically, canvas and all. That is the same tidying a stale won deal gets by hand, done immediately for a loss.

Once a deal is lost, its page offers one more question: is it worth coming back to? Four answers: Worth a call soon, Worth coming back to, Keep on file, or Do not approach again. The third one produces no reminder of any kind, ever. The fourth is a locked decision. A deal marked Do not approach again cannot be dragged back into the pipeline; someone has to open the deal itself and clear the mark first, so the decision cannot be undone by an accidental drag.

The Won and Lost columns only ever grow. Every deal your studio has closed lands in one of them and stays. Once there is something worth archiving, a button appears below the board that says what it is about to do before it does it, for example "Archive those 12" next to a line reading "12 deals were settled before [date]. Filing them away clears the funnel without losing anything." You are agreeing to a set you can already see the size of, not to a standing rule. Nothing here runs on a schedule, and the funnel is exactly as full tomorrow as you leave it today. Thirty days is the suggested cutoff, not an enforced one.

Archiving only changes which deals a screen draws. No total moves, no history is rewritten, and a deal you have filed away is one click from coming back: an Archived · N link on the funnel takes you there and back.

A deal can carry a Value and a Cost, in whatever currency the client's own record uses, or the studio's currency by default. That is as far as this product goes: there is no invoicing, no costs beyond that one field, and no bookkeeping.

The amounts on a deal also do not convert or add up across currencies. A client can be told to use its own currency instead of the studio's, but nothing here holds an exchange rate or a date one was taken on. Changing a client's currency only relabels its numbers; it never recalculates them. A funnel total or an open-value figure always speaks in the studio's own currency, because it is adding up several clients at once and belongs to none of them individually.