What the CRM is for

A pipeline that knows what the books know — the same companies, the same money.

CRM → Dashboard.

The reason to have a CRM inside an accounting system rather than beside one is that an account and a customer are the same company. A rep can see the open opportunities and the overdue invoices without exporting anything, and campaign return is measured against revenue the ledger actually recorded.

The objects:

• Leads — people who are not yet anything. See Converting a lead.
• Accounts — companies. Optionally linked to an accounting customer; see Linking a CRM account to an accounting customer.
• Contacts — people at those companies, each with per-channel consent.
• Opportunities — deals, on a pipeline with stages. See The pipeline and its stages.
• Cases — support requests with an SLA clock. See Support cases.
• Activities — calls, meetings, notes and emails against any of the above.

The dashboard shows open and weighted pipeline, win rate, open cases and open leads, plus what is closing soon and why deals were lost.