Pipelines and Deals

Deals are how you track the opportunities you're working, from the first conversation through to closed. Every deal lives on a pipeline and moves through a series of stages as it progresses.

This guide covers:

• The two ways to view your deals
• How a deal gets created
• What you'll find on a deal record
• How to manage your pipelines and stages

Two ways to see your deals

Ahoy gives you two views of the same deals – a Board and a Table. You can switch between them from the header at the top of the Deals page.

Board (Default)

When you open Deals, you land on the Board: a column for each stage in the pipeline, with your deals shown as cards you can drag from one stage to the next. The Board always shows one pipeline at a time, grouped by stage.

Each card shows the deal name, owner, amount, company, contact, and close date, along with a notes count and when it was last updated. Column headers show the stage name and how many deals are in it, and each column totals its deals on the footer, by default the total amount and the weighted amount, which an admin can change.

To move a deal forward, drag its card to another column. That change happens straight away, with no approval step – moving a deal updates its stage and recalculates its weighted value. It doesn't change the deal's close date, and it doesn't send a notification or trigger anything else on its own.

One sort applies to every column at once – you can order by Date created, Last updated, Last activity, Amount, or Close date, but you can't sort columns independently.

If you change which fields appear on the cards, that layout applies to the whole pipeline for everyone who uses it, not just your own view.

Table (All deals)

Switch to the Table view for a spreadsheet-style list of your deals. Unlike the Board, the Table shows deals across all of your pipelines at once – which is why it includes a Pipeline column. It opens with columns for Name, Pipeline, Stage, Amount, Company, Contact, Close date, and Last updated, with running totals across the top. You can sort, filter, and choose your columns.

Because the Board shows a single pipeline and the Table shows all of them, their deal counts won't match once you have more than one pipeline.

How a deal gets created

Ahoy doesn't create deals in the background the way it creates contacts and companies. A deal appears because someone added it, approved it, or imported it, and the deal's timeline records who created it. There are a handful of ways that happens:

• Add a deal directly. Use Add deal on the Board or Table. From the Board, you can add a deal straight into a specific stage.
• Create from a contact or company. On a contact or company record – or after selecting several contacts at once – choose Create deal, and the deal will automatically link them. Selecting more than one contact creates a single deal linked to all of them. If you use Select all, the deal is capped at 50 contacts – the most recently updated – and Ahoy tells you when that happens.
• Approve an AI proposal. When you ask Ahoy in Chat, or one of your AI Actions suggests a deal, it arrives as a proposal. Ahoy's AI never creates or moves a deal without your approval – nothing is written until you say yes.
• Import your existing deals. You can bring deals in from a CSV file via the import setting. Migration from some CRMs is supported too – reach out and we'll help you map your data across.
• Connect an external tool. Tools you connect through Ahoy's API can propose deals, which you approve the same way as any other proposal.

What you'll find on a deal record

Open any deal to see everything tied to it in one place. Across the top, highlight tiles show the Stage, Amount, Close date, Owner, primary contact, and Company. Below that, tabs organize the detail: Overview, Activity, Contacts, Emails, Meetings, Notes, and Files.

Amount and currency

When you type an amount into a deal, Ahoy keeps the currency you enter – type €500 and it stays in euros. The one place currency behaves differently is a CSV import: there, the currency symbol is dropped and your organization’s default currency is applied instead and it won't be converted.

The timeline fills itself in

A deal's Activity, Emails, and Meetings build up automatically through its contacts. Link a contact to a deal and that contact's emails and meetings flow onto the deal's timeline – you don't have to attach them one by one. This is why a brand-new deal can already show a history the moment you link the right person. Notes and files are the exception: you add those to the deal yourself.

Who can see a deal

A deal record is visible to everyone in your organization. Deals are shared by default, just like contacts and companies. The emails and meetings on a deal's timeline are different: each teammate sees only the ones they already have access to. So two people can open the same deal and see different timelines. The deal is shared; the correspondence underneath it isn't shared automatically along with it.

Editing a deal

You can ask Ahoy in Chat, or set up an AI Action, to update a deal – adjust the amount, move the stage, set a close date. Because a deal is your CRM data, Ahoy's AI never makes the change directly; it proposes the update and waits for your approval.

Deleting a deal

Deleting a deal removes the deal itself. The emails, meetings, and contacts it was linked to stay where they are, on those people and companies. There's no separate archive for deals, a deal's natural end state is the Closed Won or Closed Lost stage.

Managing pipelines and stages

Every deal sits on a pipeline: a set of stages a deal moves through on its way to closing. Ahoy starts you off with one default pipeline of six stages – Qualification, Needs Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed Won, and Closed Lost – each with a win probability that feeds your weighted totals.

Working with more than one pipeline

You can run more than one pipeline when a single process doesn't fit everything – a separate flow for renewals or a different product line, for example. Creating and editing pipelines is limited to account admins. When you create a new pipeline, you can start from a blank set of stages or from a sales-methodology template – SPICED, BANT, or MEDDIC – which sets up named stages for you, along with the fields that methodology tracks.

A deal belongs to a pipeline through its stage, so to move a deal to a different pipeline you change its stage – edit the deal and choose a stage there, or select deals in the Table and use Move to pipeline.

Adding and editing stages

From Settings → Pipelines, or directly from a column header on the Board, an account admin can add, rename, reorder, recolor, and delete stages. Stages belong to a single pipeline – they aren’t shared across pipelines – and each one has a name, a position, a color, a win probability, and a description. The description is worth filling in – it’s what Ahoy reads when judging whether a deal belongs in that stage – and you edit it from Settings → Pipelines rather than from the Board.

How probability decides won and lost

A stage's probability does two jobs. It's the weighting behind your weighted totals, and it's how Ahoy reads whether a deal is won or lost: 100% counts as won, 0% counts as lost. There isn't a separate won-or-lost switch, so a stage you set to 0% will be treated as lost even if it sits in the middle of your pipeline. Keep 0% and 100% for your genuinely closed stages.

Deleting stages and pipelines

Ahoy won't let you strand a deal. You can't delete a stage or a pipeline that still has deals in it – you'll be asked to move those deals first. The default pipeline can't be deleted at all. To empty a pipeline, select its deals in the Table and use Move to pipeline; you choose both the destination pipeline and the stage they move into.