CRM — Sales Pipeline

1 What is the CRM module?

CRM keeps its own list of customers and prospects, so it works on its own — with or without the Cargo module. Instead of tracking enquiries in a spreadsheet or an inbox, each opportunity becomes a lead that you move across a pipeline until it is Won or Lost.

• One lead = one opportunity — a title, the customer, an estimated value, and where it sits in your pipeline.
• A full history — every call, email, meeting and note is kept on the lead’s timeline, and follow-up tasks remind you what’s next.
• Its own customer list — leads link to a CRM Customer. When a prospect becomes a real client, the same record can create or link its accounting customer account and, if you run Cargo, its consignee/shipper (§12).
• AI where it saves time — paste an enquiry to create a lead, draft a follow-up email, get a briefing before a call, and scan the pipeline for deals going cold.

Finding your way around

Open the CRM group in the sidebar. Like every module, it carries a Dashboard, a Quick View and a Reports link at the top, then the working screens grouped into sections:

2 The Sales Pipeline board

The board shows your open leads as cards, grouped into columns — one column per stage. The default stages are:

New Contacted Quoted Negotiation Won Lost

• Move a lead by dragging its card into another column — the stage change is saved instantly and recorded on the lead’s timeline.
• Open a lead by clicking its card — the detail panel slides in from the right.
• Colours — each stage keeps one colour on the board, the list, the lead panel and the dashboard, with Won in green and Lost in red. The board also has summary tiles across the top, and each card carries an accent bar and its owner’s initial.
• Each column header shows the count and total value of its leads; the page header shows your whole open pipeline value.
• A card shows the title, customer, value, job type, owner and next-action date — the date turns red when overdue. After a scan, a risk badge appears too.

3 Creating a lead

Click New Lead at the top right. Only the Title is required — fill in as much of the rest as you know; you can complete it later.

Click Create and the lead appears in its stage column.

4 Capture a lead from an email (AI)

Most enquiries arrive as an email or chat message. Rather than retyping, paste the whole thing and let the AI fill the form.

1. Click New Lead.
2. In the green Paste an email or enquiry box at the top, paste the message.
3. Click Extract with AI.
4. The form fills in — title, source, job type, value, next-action date and notes. If the sender’s company is already on file, the customer is selected automatically. If not, it appears as a New customer, with its name ready to correct, and is added to the CRM Customers list when you create the lead. Click the × beside the name to search for a customer instead. Users without the right to add customers are asked to search and pick one.
5. Check the fields, adjust anything, and click Create.

5 Working a lead — timeline & tasks

Click any card to open the lead. The panel shows the customer’s contact card, the lead’s details, its follow-up tasks and a full activity timeline.

Log activity

Under Activity, choose a type — Note, Call, Email or Meeting — type what happened and click Log. Stage changes are logged automatically, so the timeline is a complete record of how the deal moved.

Follow-up tasks

Under Follow-up tasks, type a task, optionally set a due date, and click Add. Tick a task to mark it done. Overdue open tasks show in red, and a due task sends you a reminder (see §13).

Edit & remove

Edit lets you change any field, including moving stage, recording a Lost reason, or re-linking the customer. The 🗑 button removes the lead from the board but keeps its history — nothing is permanently deleted.

A lead is saved only with a stage and a customer that exist, an Est. value that is a number and dates that are real dates; anything else is refused with a message saying what to fix.

Raising a quotation

Quotation on the lead raises a draft quotation filled in from the lead and its customer, and opens it. A lead in an earlier stage moves to Quoted (the message says so). The stage only ever moves forward: a deal already in Negotiation, Won or Lost stays where it is when you quote it again. The quotation form itself is covered in the Quotation manual.

• A quotation is refused if its amount or discount is negative, the discount is more than the amount, the exchange rate is not above zero, or it is valid only until a date before its own date.
• Converted is set only by converting the quotation to an invoice; it cannot be picked by hand.
• A cancelled quotation cannot be invoiced or sent for signature, and a signature link sent before it was cancelled no longer works. Change its status back first if it was cancelled by mistake.

6 AI assistants — Draft & Brief

Two AI helpers live at the top of the lead panel.

Draft follow-up

Click Draft follow-up and the AI writes a short, professional follow-up email using the lead’s history — what was last discussed and what’s outstanding. It opens in an editable box with a subject and body.

AI Brief

Click AI Brief for a short briefing on the customer before you call — who they are, your relationship with them, what’s open in your pipeline with them, and a suggested next step. It reads from your CRM history — and, when the CRM customer is linked to a consignee/shipper, their recent sea/air/misc jobs (how much, how recently, as shipper or consignee).

AI Brief needs a customer linked to the lead. If the button is greyed out, edit the lead and pick a customer first.

7 Run scan — find deals at risk

Click Run scan in the board header to check your open pipeline for leads going cold. Each open lead is scored 0–100 for how at-risk it is, using signals like:

• how long since the last activity,
• how long it’s been open without progressing,
• an overdue next-action date, and overdue follow-up tasks,
• the stage (a late-stage deal going quiet matters more than a brand-new lead).

When it finishes, a results panel lists the leads needing attention, and the board cards get a badge:

At risk  (score 70+)   Watch  (score 40–69)   — healthy leads stay unbadged.

Each lead’s owner also receives a single notification summarising their at-risk leads (see §13). Click any row in the results to jump straight to that lead.

8 Dashboard

The Dashboard gives you the shape of your pipeline for a date range (set it in the top-right picker; it defaults to the current financial year). It reads the leads created in that window.

• KPI tiles — New Leads, Open, Won, Lost, Win Rate %, Pipeline Value, and how many are At Risk.
• Pipeline by Stage — a funnel of how many leads (and how much value) sit in each stage.
• Top Customers by Pipeline Value — who your biggest open opportunities are with.
• Open Leads by Owner — each salesperson’s open count and value.

9 Quick View

Quick View is a fast, read-only list of every lead — handy when you just want to search rather than work the board. Type in the search box to filter by lead, customer or owner; click a row to jump to the board.

Each line shows the lead, customer, stage, owner, job type, value, next-action date and (after a scan) the risk score.

10 Reports

Under Reports everything reads back for a date range. Each report can be filtered, exported and printed like every other Ritzy report.

11 Pipeline Stages (set-up)

Masters → Pipeline Stages is where you tailor the board’s columns. The module ships with a sensible default set, but you can rename, reorder or add stages to match how your team sells.

Retiring a stage is a deactivate, not a delete. A stage that still holds active deals cannot be retired — the message says how many; move them to another stage on the board first, so no deal drops off the board. Deactivated stages stay listed here so you can switch them back on.

12 CRM Customers (set-up)

Masters → Customers is the CRM’s own list of prospects and clients. A lead, its activities and tasks, and a quotation raised from it all point at a CRM customer. It needs nothing outside CRM, so a company that does not run Cargo uses CRM exactly the same way.

Linked records

Open a customer to see what it is linked to. Each link can be created from the CRM customer’s details, pointed at a record that already exists, or removed.

Unlink only removes the link; the account or consignee/shipper itself is not changed. Deleting a CRM customer that has leads, activities or quotations makes it inactive instead, so its history keeps a name.

13 Reminders & notifications

CRM uses the same notification centre (the bell in the top bar) as the rest of Ritzy, so reminders reach you wherever you are in the app.

These run on a background timer every few minutes, so reminders arrive even when nobody has the board open.

14 Contacts, account hierarchy & 360° view

Open a customer in Masters → Customers. Three tabs:

On a deal, pick the Contact you are dealing with; the drawer’s email and phone then use that person’s details.

15 Web forms — leads and cases from your website

Masters → Web Forms. Create a form, choose whether a submission creates a lead or a support case, its source, default owner and thank-you message, then press Embed. You get a hosted form link you can put on your website, an iframe snippet, a plain HTML form and a JavaScript snippet.

• A visitor is matched to an existing customer by their email (or company name); otherwise a new Prospect is created with them as its primary contact.
• A lead form creates a deal in the first stage with the message on its timeline. Automation rules (§19) can assign it round-robin the moment it arrives, and a running autoresponder campaign (§17) can reply to it.
• Spam protection: a hidden trap field and a per-address limit. If a form is abused, Rotate link issues a new address — the old embed stops working.

16 Email, calls, SMS & WhatsApp

The deal drawer, a contact and the 360° view carry a row of buttons. Everything sent or logged lands on the timeline, marked inbound ↓ or outbound ↑.

17 Email campaigns

Operations → Email Campaigns. A campaign is a segment (who: account type, industry, country, city, owner, deal stage or source, created dates, all contacts or just the primary) and one or more emails.

Use merge fields like {{name}} and {{company}}, preview, and send yourself a Test. The Stats tab shows sent, opened, clicked, unsubscribed and failed per email. Every email carries an unsubscribe link; anyone who unsubscribes, or is marked No marketing email, is never sent another campaign. Opens are counted only when the recipient’s email program loads images, so treat them as a minimum.

18 Support cases, SLA & knowledge base

Operations → Support Cases is the queue for your customers’ problems — raised by phone, email, a web form, chat or walk-in. Each case has a priority, a status (New, Open, Pending customer, Resolved, Closed), an assignee and a conversation of public replies (optionally emailed to the customer) and internal notes. A new case always opens on a blank form, even straight after another case.

• Masters → SLA Policies sets the first-response and resolution targets per priority. The queue counts down to each target and flags breaches; breaches are also alerted (§13). The clock runs in calendar hours, 24×7.
• Masters → Knowledge Base holds how-to articles. A case suggests matching articles; insert one into a reply or link it to the case. Suggest reply drafts an answer with AI for you to edit — nothing is sent until you send it.

19 Automation rules

Masters → Automation Rules. A rule is when something happens, if conditions match, do actions. Quick-start buttons create the common ones.

Conditions include source, stage, value range, job type and “only unassigned”. Everything a rule does is written on the deal’s timeline, and Log lists each time it ran.

20 Tasks & Calendar

Operations → Tasks & Calendar shows your follow-ups across all deals and customers — or the whole team’s — as a list or a month calendar. Tasks have a type (call, meeting, email, visit, demo, to-do), a priority and an optional time. Overdue, today and this-week counts sit at the top; click a day to add a task on it.

21 Deal scoring, win probability & sales forecast

• Engagement (Hot) — each open deal gets a 0–100 score from recent meetings, calls, emails and replies (inbound counts more), cooling off when the deal goes quiet. 60+ shows a Hot tag; the board’s Hot filter shows only those.
• Win probability — set per stage in Pipeline Stages; a deal can override it. Give each deal an Expected close date.
• Analysis → Sales Forecast places open deals in their close month and shows pipeline, weighted (value × probability), commit (70%+), best case (40%+) and a history-based projection (value × your actual win rate over the last 12 months), plus win rate, average deal size, average sales cycle and win rate by source. Deals without a close date are placed using the average sales cycle and shown in italics.
• The Dashboard adds a team panel: activities per salesperson, open pipeline, wins, win rate, overdue tasks, and pipeline health (stale deals, hot deals, deals with no next step).

22 Quotation e-signature

On a quotation, Send for signature emails the customer a link (or copies it for you to send). They see the quotation and either accept — typing their name and drawing a signature — or decline with a reason. The quotation becomes Accepted or Rejected, the name, time, network address and signature are recorded on it, and you are notified.

Only the current revision can be signed; revising the quotation needs a fresh link, and a response once given is final. A cancelled quotation cannot be sent, and a customer opening an earlier link is told it has been withdrawn. Withdraw cancels an unanswered link. This is a simple electronic signature of acceptance, not a certificate-based digital signature.

23 Tips & FAQ

Does the AI send emails for me?

No. AI writes drafts only. An email goes out only when you press Send yourself (or when a campaign or automation rule you set up sends it).

The new screens say the CRM upgrade is needed.

Your administrator runs 072_crm_sales_core.sql, 073_crm_campaigns.sql and 074_crm_cases.sql from DBA Console → Upgrade Scripts, then grants the new screens in User Manager.

Do I have to link a customer to create a lead?

No — the customer is optional. You can create the lead first and link the customer later by editing it. (The AI Brief button needs a linked customer, though.)

What makes a lead “at risk”?

Mainly inactivity — time since the last activity and time open without progress — plus an overdue next-action date, overdue tasks, and how far along the stage is. Run a scan to score them.

Why do the Dashboard and Reports show fewer leads than the board?

Those screens are scoped to a date range (leads created in the window), while the board shows all your currently open leads regardless of age. Widen the date range to include older leads.

If I remove a lead, is it gone for good?

No. Remove takes it off the board but keeps its history, so nothing is permanently deleted.

Can I change the pipeline stages?

Yes — go to Masters → Pipeline Stages (§11) to rename, reorder, add or retire them. A stage is retired only once its deals have been moved out.

Will quoting a deal in Negotiation move it back to Quoted?

No. Raising a quotation moves a lead forward to Quoted only from an earlier stage, never back from Negotiation, Won or Lost (§5).

The CRM group isn’t in my sidebar.

CRM is an optional module. Ask your administrator to enable it for your company; the AI helpers additionally need the AI service switched on.