CRM

Track customers, contacts, and the opportunities you’re chasing — from first phone call through to won (or lost) deals.

When to use

Use the CRM module to:

• Keep a single source of truth for who your customers are and who to contact at each one.
• Capture inbound enquiries as opportunities — even before you know which customer they’ll belong to.
• See every conversation, quote, and follow-up for an opportunity in one place.
• Run the sales pipeline — what’s open, what’s overdue, what’s likely to close this month.

If you’re only quoting one-off jobs and don’t need to track follow-ups, you can skip straight to the Quoting & Sales module. The CRM sits behind quoting — every quote belongs to an opportunity, which belongs to a customer.

Overview

The CRM is built around three records:

• Customers — the businesses (or individuals) you sell to.
• Contacts — the people at each customer. Every customer must have at least one contact, with one marked as the default.
• Opportunities — a specific potential deal. An opportunity starts as a prospect enquiry and ends as Won (a job) or Lost.

Quotes hang off opportunities. A single opportunity can have multiple quotes (e.g. “Option A — Aluminium”, “Option B — uPVC”), with one designated as the primary quote that drives reporting.

Key features

Customer records

Each customer captures:

• Name (required and unique across your business) and an optional Display Name for trading-as.
• Postal address, phone, email, notes.
• Sales Rep — the person at your business who owns the relationship.
• Customer Class (e.g. Gold / Silver / Bronze) — a pricing tier that drives standard markup.
• Account Type — the default payment schedule (e.g. deposit required) that flows onto new quotes.
• Lead-time override — if a specific customer has a custom build lead time, set it here instead of using the global default.
• Site address auto-fill — for customers whose deliveries always go to the same warehouse, tick “Use address for site address” and new opportunities will pre-populate.

Contacts

Multiple contacts per customer, with roles like Builder, Site Manager, Project Manager, Quantity Surveyor, Director, Account Manager. Exactly one contact must be marked as the default — that’s who gets used when you don’t explicitly pick someone (e.g. on a new opportunity).

Opportunities

The heart of the sales pipeline. An opportunity tracks:

• Title — what the customer is asking for, in your words.
• Customer — optional at creation. You can log an enquiry with just a prospect name, email and phone, and link the customer later when you know who they’re working for.
• Primary Contact — filtered to the linked customer’s contacts.
• Category — your job category (required for sales target reporting).
• Source — where the lead came from (required, drives marketing reports).
• Probability — how likely you think it is to close. Used to compute weighted pipeline value.
• Sales Date — dual-purpose:
  • While open: the expected close / next follow-up date. Used for pipeline month bucketing and the Overdue flag.
  • Once Won or Lost: the date the outcome was recorded.
• Tender Date — only shown for categories that involve tenders.

Opportunity lifecycle

Opportunities move through a small set of statuses:

The display stage breaks Quoting into Estimating / Draft / Sent based on the active quote revision, so the pipeline at a glance shows you what’s where.

Contact logs (follow-ups)

Every customer interaction can be logged against the opportunity: phone call, email, in-person meeting, letter. Logs can be flagged as requires action with a due date, which surfaces them in the follow-up queue until marked complete.

All logs live on the opportunity, regardless of whether they relate to a specific quote — so the full communication history is always in one place.

Customer pricing classes

Customer Class (e.g. Gold / Silver / Bronze) is a lookup you maintain under Settings. Each class carries a default markup percentage. Assigning a class to a customer means new quotes start with the right markup.

How to: add a new customer

1. From the main menu, open Customers → New.
2. Enter the customer Name (must be unique) and any trading name in Display Name.
3. Fill in address, phone, email, and notes.
4. Assign the Sales Rep who owns the relationship.
5. (Optional) Pick a Customer Class for pricing tier and a Default Branch for multi-branch businesses.
6. Save. You’ll be prompted to add at least one Contact — the first contact is automatically marked as default.

How to: log a new enquiry as an opportunity

When a phone call comes in and you don’t yet know which customer the caller will become:

1. Opportunities → New.
2. Enter a clear Title describing what they’re asking for.
3. Leave Customer blank and fill the Prospect Name / Email / Phone fields instead.
4. Pick a Category (e.g. Residential — New Build) and a Source (e.g. Referral, Website).
5. Probability auto-fills from your CRM defaults — adjust if needed.
6. Set a Sales Date for when you expect to next action this.
7. Save.

When you create the first quote, FSManager will automatically convert the prospect details into a Customer record and link them. You can also link to an existing customer at any time before then.

How to: progress an opportunity through the pipeline

From the opportunity detail view, the toolbar exposes the actions you’ll use most:

• Add Estimation — creates a new quote (or re-estimates an existing one) under this opportunity.
• Qualify — moves an opportunity from New to Qualifying.
• Follow Up — logs a contact log with a due date for follow-through.
• View Budget — opens the cost budget on the active quote revision.
• Add Markup — applies a markup or margin percentage to the active quote.
• Win Quote — marks the opportunity as Won.
• Lost Opportunity — marks the opportunity as Lost; you’ll be prompted for a Lost Reason.
• Clone Opportunity — copies the opportunity (title only — no quotes), handy for a repeat customer asking for “the same again”.

How to: merge duplicate customers

If you’ve ended up with two customer records for the same business (common after CSV imports):

1. Open the Customers list view.
2. Select the duplicate customers (multi-select).
3. Use the Merge Customers admin action and pick the record to keep.
4. All opportunities, quotes, jobs and contacts are re-parented to the kept record; duplicates are soft-deleted.

Tips & gotchas

• Every customer needs a default contact. Save will block until exactly one contact is marked Is Default. If you delete the default, mark another before saving.
• Don’t leave Probability at zero unless you mean it. It feeds the weighted pipeline value — a “100% probability” opportunity at $0 is a saved-but-unbudgeted slot in the pipeline.
• Sales Date is your follow-up calendar. Every time you action an opportunity, push the Sales Date forward to the next planned action. Anything with a Sales Date today-or-earlier shows up as Overdue.
• Multi-customer projects: if you’re quoting the head contractor but the work goes to a sub, set Customer on the Quote to the head contractor — it overrides the opportunity’s customer for that one quote.
• Lost opportunities need a reason. Don’t leave it as “Other” by default — set up Lost Reasons under Settings that match the actual reasons you lose (price, lead time, spec, etc.) so your reports tell you something useful.
• Tender Date only appears for categories where it makes sense. If you don’t see the field, check the Category’s Tender Date Can Be Set flag under Settings → Job Categories.

Related

• Quoting & Sales — building quotes against an opportunity
• Job Management — what happens when a quote is won
• Reporting & Analytics — sales pipeline, sales targets, and the Sales Predictor
• Administration → Settings — configuring categories, lead sources, lost reasons, customer classes