Working deals: pipelines, stages, and winning

A deal is how Current tracks a piece of business from first conversation through won or lost. Every deal lives in a pipeline, moves through stages on a board, and — when it's won — can hand straight off into a project. Current starts you with four pipelines, and you can add your own.

If your team tracks a kind of work that doesn't fit the four built-in pipelines, add one. Open Deals, choose Edit columns, then New pipeline. Sales Managers and Admins with CRM access can do this; everyone else sees the pipelines but can't change them.

1. 1
   Name it

   Give it the name your team already uses. You can rename it later without disturbing any deals in it.
2. 2
   Choose what its deals count as

   New Logo, Expansion, Renewal or Project. This is how the deals in this pipeline are read by goals, commissions and forecasts, so pick the one that matches the money. A pipeline for acquisitions, for instance, is usually New Logo.
3. 3
   Choose who sees it

   Everyone, or only the people you list. See the note below on what that does and doesn't do.
4. 4
   Add its columns

   A new pipeline starts empty. Add the stages your team moves work through, in the same Edit columns screen, then Save columns.

You can also reorder your pipelines into the order your team works in, and archive one you've finished with. An archived pipeline drops off the board tabs and stops being offered for new deals; its deals keep their history and still appear in reports and search. Restore it any time. Nothing is ever deleted.

Every deal already carries the amounts, the close date and the owner. If a pipeline needs to track something else — an acquisition's EBITDA, a project's site count, the percentage of revenue that recurs — add a custom field to that pipeline. It appears on every deal in that pipeline and nowhere else, so one team's extra detail never clutters another team's board.

Open Deals, choose Edit columns, and find the Custom fields box inside the pipeline you want. Type a name, pick what kind of value it holds, and add it. Sales Managers and Admins with CRM access set fields up; anyone who can already edit a deal can fill them in from the deal drawer.

There are eight kinds: Money, Number, Percent, Text, Date, Dropdown, Checkboxes, and Yes / no. Dropdown and Checkboxes take the list of answers you allow, typed one per line — Dropdown for one answer, Checkboxes for any number of them. Reach for those two whenever the answer should be one of a set, because everybody then picks the same wording and the field becomes something you can count rather than only read.

Rename a field by clicking its name, and use the arrows to put your fields in the order you want to read them in. Renaming or reordering keeps everything already entered. Retiring a field takes it off the deal drawer but keeps the values you saved, so restoring it later brings them all back.

1. 1
   Open the company record

   Find the account this deal belongs to — every deal is tied to a company.
2. 2
   Click Start Opportunity

   Or use the quick-create button from the deals board directly.
3. 3
   Pick the pipeline and enter the basics

   Name, amount (one-time and/or recurring), and a projected close date.
4. 4
   Save

   The deal lands in the first open stage of its pipeline and shows up on your board and in Sales Home.

The Deals page shows a drag-and-drop board of open deals, one column per stage. The pipeline tabs sit at the very top of the page with the Board/List toggle beside them, and one toolbar underneath holds everything that narrows the board: a search box and six labeled menus — Status, Type, Owner, Value, Close, and Chance. Each button always names what it's set to, so the toolbar reads as a sentence about what you're looking at. Set a filter and its button turns purple and shows the value in place, with an x that clears just that one; a Reset button appears whenever anything is set. The stage columns size themselves to your screen: a short pipeline spreads out to use the width, and a long one shows the next stage peeking in at the right edge with a count of how many more sit past it. Click that count, or the arrow at the left edge, to page through the stages a screenful at a time.

Everyone with deal access sees the whole workspace's board — Account Executives included. The Owner menu opens a searchable list: All owners, Mine, My team (when you lead a sales team), and, for leadership, every CRM person by name; editing a deal still requires owning it or working its account. Switch Status to Won, Lost, or All and Current swaps to a list view instead — a kanban board only makes sense for deals still in motion. Each card shows the partner, the MRR/one-time split, how long the deal has sat in its current stage, and the owner.

The totals above the board, and the subtotal on every column header, add up what your deals are worth at face value. At the end of that strip is a cell marked Totals holding two words, Raw and Weighted. Choose Weighted and every one of those numbers becomes value multiplied by win probability instead, so a 10,000 deal sitting at 30 percent counts as 3,000. Nothing about the deals changes; only the arithmetic does, on the top row and in the column headers together, so the two always agree.

It starts on Raw, and Current remembers which way you left it, for you alone. A colleague opening the same board sees it their way, and a board nobody has switched reads exactly as it always did. The standing Weighted tile in that strip is a Raw-mode thing: in Weighted mode every money tile is already a weighted number, so it steps aside rather than saying the same thing twice.

Win probability comes from two places, and both are already in front of you. Every stage carries a default probability, set in Edit columns beside the stage name, so a deal picks one up simply by being where it is. Any individual deal can override that with its own number in the Win probability field in the deal drawer, for the one you know is better or worse than its stage suggests. Set the stage defaults once and the weighted view is worth reading from that moment on.

The Chance menu in the toolbar narrows the board to one band: Likely is 70 percent and up, Toss-up is 40 to 69, and Long shot is anything under 40. Any is the default and holds every deal. It saves into a view with the rest of your filters, so "my Likely deals in New Logo" is one click from anywhere on the page.

Click a card and a drawer opens with the deal in one place: its value and stage, the contacts attached to it, an activity section with an inline composer for notes, calls and meetings, a follow-up action, and any custom fields its pipeline adds.

An Emails section sits alongside the activity feed, holding the mail Current has synced for that deal's company. It's the same email history the company record shows, threaded and newest first, cut to the twelve most recent threads — enough to see where the conversation stands before you call, without leaving the deal to find out. Each thread expands to the full message. "View all on the company page" opens the whole archive.

• ＋It starts collapsed and fetches nothing until you open it, so the board and the drawer stay fast.
• ＋You see what you're already allowed to see: mail from your own mailbox, plus anyone's for sales leadership, and only on companies you can open. The rules are the same as everywhere else — see "CRM email sync: what lands on a company, and why".
• ＋A company with nothing synced says so, and names Microsoft 365 as what feeds it. A read that fails says it failed and offers a retry, rather than showing you an empty list that reads like there was never any mail.

A stage can carry a checkpoint: the questions a deal has to have answered before it's allowed onto that column. Drag a card onto a stage that asks something and a short dialog opens with only the answers that are still blank; fill them in and the move completes, cancel and the card goes back with nothing written. Deals you already have are left where they are — a checkpoint applies the next time somebody moves a deal, never retroactively.

Two more switches sit beside it, per pipeline and both off until you turn them on: "Deals move one stage at a time" and "Deals can't move backward". Closing a deal as Won or Lost, and reopening one, are always allowed whichever way those are set. A pipeline can also move deals for you as quotes are created and sent. All of it is set up in Edit columns by sales leadership, and it's covered in "Checkpoints: stage questions, movement rules, and Current Sales OS" — including Current Sales OS, which builds a whole working process in one pass if you don't have one yet.

Drag a deal into the Won or Lost zone (or use the action from the deal drawer) and Current opens a short dialog to capture why. A lost reason is required — Current won't let a deal close as lost without one, since that reason is what feeds pipeline reporting later. A won reason is optional but encouraged. The lost reasons you pick from are your workspace's own list, the same one a contact record uses, and a sales manager or workspace admin can edit it under Settings, Lost reasons.

Won and Lost can carry a checkpoint of their own, and when they do, those questions sit in this dialog underneath the reason. It's the same short form the board opens on a drag, so "what do we need before this is Closed Won" is a question you can actually ask.

Winning a deal is the one moment Current celebrates out loud — a short animated burst on the card when you mark it won (a quieter glow if you have reduced motion turned on). If the deal has a signed quote attached, winning routes you into the same guided wizard used to turn a won quote into a project: pick whether the work becomes a Current project or a support ticket, review the tasks and phases the wizard proposes, and confirm. Nothing is created in your PSA until you confirm that final step. See "ScalePad Quoter: turn won quotes into projects and charges" for the wizard walkthrough.

Current creates that renewal deal about 90 days before the agreement's end date, while the agreement is still active. Plenty happens in those 90 days. The most common thing is the renewal itself: you close the old agreement in your PSA and write a new one, often folding a site or a service into a bigger agreement. The old agreement is now inactive, and the renewal deal Current made for it has nothing left to renew.

Current watches for that. When the agreement behind an auto-created renewal stops being active in your PSA, the deal is hidden: it comes off the board and the list, and it stops counting toward your pipeline totals, your goals, your dashboards and your reports. Nothing is deleted and nothing is marked lost. If the agreement goes active again, the deal comes straight back.

To see them, set the Ended renewals filter on the Deals page to Shown. The number beside it tells you how many are being held back right now, and each one is marked with an Ended chip next to its deal type so you can tell them apart from live renewals. Reset filters puts it back to Hidden.