How do I turn a lead into a deal?

A deal is the money side of a transaction: what the property is worth, what your commission is, the dates the sale turned on, and how far the money has got. It is normally the continuation of a lead rather than a new record you retype — the conversation you already had stays with it.

From a lead

• Open the lead. The Deals panel on it shows how many deals are linked to this lead.
• Choose Turn into a deal. The button is there until the lead has a deal, and a lead cannot be turned into a second one.
• Choose the currency the deal is in. This is the one thing the lead cannot tell the CRM, so it is asked for.
• Add the offer and the date it was made if there is one. Both are optional.
• Choose Create the deal.

The deal inherits the lead, its contact, the property and the agent working it, so nothing is typed twice. The messages stay on the lead and the deal reads its timeline from there: one conversation, one home. You can also start a deal that never was a lead with New deal on the Deals page — a walk-in, for example.

What a deal records

Open Deals in the menu, under Team & reports. Each deal carries a Deal name, the Offer and the Value, the Currency, and the Commission — either a rate as a percentage of the value or a flat fee. Under Key dates there are three: Offer made, Agreed and Completed. There are only three on purpose. Housing Market Group works in markets that each close a sale under their own instruments, and these three are what all of them have under some name; anything else your market needs goes on the deal's checklist, in your own words.

A deal is in one currency and stays in it. Nothing is converted, and figures in two currencies are never added together anywhere in the CRM.

The five statuses

• Pending — expected, and not yet agreed.
• Won — agreed and earned, but not billed.
• Invoiced — billed, and the money is outstanding.
• Paid — received. Nothing moves out of Paid.
• Lost — and a lost deal can be moved back to Pending if it comes alive again.

Change status moves a deal, asks when it happened (leave it empty for today) and, for a lost deal, why. The date cannot be in the future, and a move the deal cannot make from where it is now is refused rather than half-applied.

Finishing with a deal

Archive takes a deal off your list and keeps everything on it; Show the archive finds it again and Restore brings it back. An archived deal appears in no list, no forecast, no report, no dashboard figure and no contact timeline until it is restored. Delete archives as well: a commission record and every party's claim on it are not something a click should destroy.

Deal tracking is part of Pro and Business. On the free plan the page explains that instead of drawing controls that would refuse. Commission splits, the Forecast tab and the Statement tab are part of Business — see "How do I invoice a deal, and who is owed what?".