Leads & Opportunities
A Lead is an early-stage potential deal: a contact or company that might buy from you, but for which you don't yet have (or don't yet need) an estimated amount and closing date. AdmCloud stores Leads in the same record as CRM Opportunities; the difference is just an internal flag showing whether it's already being handled as a deal in progress (with expected revenue, probability and a close date) or as an early contact you're nurturing. You can track it from a list, a visual Kanban board grouped by stage, or its own detail screen.
What is it and what is it for?
Leads let you centralize the tracking of prospective customers from the first contact: who they are, how they found you (their Acquisition Source), what they're interested in, who on your team is handling them, and which stage of your sales process they're at. You can add the items or services a Lead is interested in (with quantity and price) to get a sense of the deal's size, even before it becomes a formal quote.
Every Lead moves through the Sales Stages your company set up (for example: New, Contacted, Qualified, Closed Won, Closed Lost). These are the same stages Opportunities use, so a Lead and an Opportunity live side by side on the same board, and you can choose to show one, the other, or both at once. Once the deal is qualified (you have a clear expected value and close date for it), check the Qualified Opportunity box on its form: from that point on it's listed and treated as an Opportunity, with no need to create a new record.
From a Lead's detail screen you can generate a Quote with a single click, pulling in the items you already entered on it without retyping them.
How to use it
- Open the Leads list. It has four views: Open (default), Board (Kanban view), Closed and All (includes voided). You can filter by date, subsidiary, customer/prospect, sales rep, customer class and item class, and customize which columns are shown in the table.
- On the Board view, each column represents a Sales Stage and each card a Lead or an Opportunity. Use the Include Leads and Include Opportunities switches to choose which cards to see, filter by sales rep, and sort cards by priority or by days since last contact. You can drag a card from one column to another to change its stage directly. Stages marked as "closing" stages don't show cards on the board — instead they indicate where deals get closed.
- Click Create to capture a new Lead. Fill in at least the Name and the Sales Stage; the rest of the fields (Customer or Prospect, Sales Rep, Contact, Phone, Email, Item Class, Acquisition Source, Expected Revenue, Probability, Estimated Close Date, Budget, Notes) are optional but help you qualify the deal better.
- If the Lead already has products or services of interest, add them in the items section: pick the item, quantity, price and, if applicable, the discount and tax. AdmCloud automatically calculates the subtotal, discount, tax and total.
- Attach any files you need (for example a proposal or an email from the customer) and save.
- From a Lead's Details screen you can edit it, duplicate it, generate a Quote from its items, change its stage from the Change Stage menu without opening the full form, delete it (if it has no linked documents) and review the documents already generated from it under Applied Documents.
Key fields
| Field | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Name | Identifies the Lead in lists and on the board. Required. |
| Sales Stage | Which step of your sales process it's at. Required, and determines which column it appears in on the board. |
| Customer / Prospect | Who the deal belongs to, if it's already registered in your Customers catalog. |
| Contact, Company, Position, Phone, Email | Details of the person you're dealing with, even if they don't exist yet as a Customer or Prospect. Email is validated for a valid email format. |
| Sales Rep | Who on your team is handling the Lead; they get a notification and an email when assigned. Their employee record must have an email address configured. |
| Acquisition Source | How this Lead found your company (referral, social media, advertising, etc.), from the Acquisition Sources catalog. |
| Item Class | Category of the product or service of interest, useful for filtering and reporting by business line. |
| Expected Revenue, Probability, Estimated Close Date | Your estimate of how much the deal could be worth, how likely it is to close, and by when. |
| Budget | The budget the prospective customer has available for this deal, if you know it. |
| Qualified Opportunity | Checkbox that, when checked, moves the record to be listed as an Opportunity instead of a Lead, without creating a new record. |
| Reminder Days | After how many days without contact the board highlights the card in red, so you don't forget to follow up. |
| Items | Products or services of interest, with quantity, price, discount and tax; used as the basis for generating a Quote. |
| Subsidiary | Only shown if your company has subsidiaries enabled; which one the Lead belongs to. |
| Notes | Free-text space to note down details of the negotiation. |
Validations when saving
- Name and Sales Stage are required; the Sales Stage must exist in your stages catalog.
- If you set an Email, it must have a valid email format.
- If you assign a Sales Rep, their employee record must have an email address configured; otherwise the record cannot be saved.
- If you set a Customer/Prospect, Item Class, Acquisition Source or Currency, those records must exist and not be voided.
- Subsidiary is required if your company has subsidiaries enabled, and cannot be a subsidiary marked as read-only.
- Every item line must have an active item, its unit of measure (if the item requires one) and its tax schedule; if the item requires or forbids attributes, the line must respect that.
- Changing a Lead's Sales Stage to one marked as "Lost" requires the extra CRM "Lost Deal" permission.
- A Lead cannot be deleted while it has linked documents (for example a Quote generated from it); unlink or delete those first.
Availability
- This feature requires the Premium Plus CRM plan or higher, or the Enterprise plan with the CRM module active; if it isn't available, the screen shows the "not available on this edition" message.
- Requires the CRM "Opportunities" permission on your user group (with add, edit, delete or void level depending on the action). This same permission controls both Leads and Opportunities, since they share the same security screen entry.
- Changing a Lead to a "Lost" stage additionally requires the extra CRM "Lost Deal" permission.
- The Subsidiary field is only required and visible if your company has subsidiaries enabled.
- If your company uses custom fields on Leads/Opportunities, only the ones marked as visible on Leads appear on this screen.
- The Create Custom Field button only appears if your plan includes custom fields.
Tips and common mistakes
Use the Board for your pipeline review. Filter by sales rep and sort by "Days since last contact" to quickly spot deals that haven't been touched in a while.
Don't re-enter items. If the Lead already has its products of interest loaded, generate the Quote from its Details screen instead of building one from scratch.
"Employee has no email configured" shows up if you try to assign a Sales Rep whose record has no email address. Fill it in on their Employee record before assigning them.
Can't mark a Lead as Lost? You need the extra CRM "Lost Deal" permission — ask whoever manages your company's security to grant it.
There's no "convert" button: to have a Lead treated as an Opportunity, just check its Qualified Opportunity box and save — it stays the same record, only where it's listed changes.