Leads & pipeline

A lead is one deal for one person. Creating it creates the contact too, so you never file the same customer twice.

1. 1Go to Leads and click New Lead. You can also open a contact and click New lead in their Leads section, which pre-fills their details.
2. 2Enter First name, Last name, Email and Phone. Email is required, phone is optional.
3. 3Describe the job in Project, then pick a Project type: New Installation, Replacement, Repair, Renovation, Service Call, Maintenance, Inspection or Other.
4. 4Pick a Source: Google, Referral, Social, Partner, Repeat, Website, Yard Sign, Direct Mail, Home Show or Other. Choosing Referral adds a Referred by box.
5. 5Fill in the job site under Site address, City, State and ZIP. All four are optional, so you can file a lead off a phone call before you know where the work is.
6. 6Add Est. value ($), Timeline and Notes if you have them, then click Create lead. The lead lands in the New Lead stage with a "Contact within 24h" task already on it, due 24 hours out.

Managolio matches people by email first, then by phone. File a lead for someone already in your address book and it attaches to that contact instead of making a second copy of them, and any blank fields on their record get filled in from what you just typed. Nothing you already have is overwritten, and one person can carry as many leads as they bring you. On Contacts, adding someone whose email or phone already belongs to another record is refused outright, and the message names who it clashes with.

Every automated message Managolio sends a customer goes by email: appointment reminders, proposals, invoices and payment reminders. There is no text-message option, so a contact with no email is a dead end. That is why the Email box is required on both the New Lead and New contact forms, and why a contact who somehow has none is called out on their record.

The pipeline runs New Lead → Qualified → Consultation → Site Visit → Proposal Sent, then Won or Lost. Every move is written to the lead timeline, so you can always see who moved what and when.

1. 1In Board view, drag a card between columns. In List view, open the lead and use the stage dropdown at the top of the slide-over.
2. 2Consultation and Site Visit need a street and a city on the lead first, because someone is about to drive to the property. If they are missing, Managolio blocks the move and offers to open the lead so you can add them.
3. 3Proposal Sent needs a proposal that has actually gone out. So does Won, unless you run the Maintenance module, where a deal can close as a service plan with no estimate behind it.
4. 4A lead that has already been converted to a project cannot be moved back into the pipeline. Follow it on Projects instead.

You will not have to drag most deals across the line. Composing a proposal moves its lead to Proposal Sent. The customer accepting that proposal moves it to Won, and so does converting an estimate into a project. These moves only ever go forward: nothing automatic drags a deal backwards, nothing touches a deal you have already marked Won or Lost, and each one lands on the timeline marked (automatic).

Both views show the same leads. Your choice is saved to your account, so it follows you from your laptop to your phone.

1. 1Use the List / Board toggle at the top right of the Leads page.
2. 2Board gives you the kanban, a search box, and Owner, Type and Source filters. Import and export sit in the small menu at the end of that row.
3. 3List gives you a full grid with search, Filters, Columns, Import and Export. The columns are First name, Last name, Project, Type, Stage, Owner and Est. value, plus Source, which is available but hidden until you switch it on.

A lead goes stale once it has sat in the same stage for more than 7 days. Only open deals count, so Won and Lost are never flagged. Moving it to another stage resets the clock. Logging a call or a note does not, because the clock measures time in stage, not silence. You will see the day count turn amber on the board card, a Stale badge on the lead slide-over, and a running count in Needs Attention on your Dashboard.

Everything you log stays on one timeline for that lead, newest first, with your initials and how long ago it was. Managolio writes to the same timeline: a System entry when the lead is created, and a Stage Change entry every time the stage moves.

1. 1Open the lead and stay on the Activity tab.
2. 2Type what happened in the "Log a call, note, or next step" box.
3. 3Pick the type: Note, Call, Email, Text, Meeting or Site Visit.
4. 4Click Log.

Every new lead arrives with one task already on it, "Contact within 24h", dated 24 hours out. Add your own from the Tasks tab, each with a due date and the teammate who owns it. This is the lead's own list; the header tasks icon and the company-wide task list gather everyone's open tasks across leads and jobs. See Tasks & follow-ups for the whole picture.

1. 1Open the lead and switch to the Tasks tab. The tab shows how many are still open.
2. 2Type the task in the "Add a task" box.
3. 3Set a due date and an owner with the two chips underneath. Leave the date on No date for something with no deadline, and leave the owner on you or hand it to a teammate.
4. 4Press Enter, or click Add. Need to link it elsewhere or add more detail? Click More options to open the full task window with this lead already attached.
5. 5Tick the checkbox to complete a task, or tick it again to reopen it. Completed tasks drop to the bottom of the list.

Won is where a deal leaves sales and becomes work.

1. 1Drag the card to Won, or pick Won from the stage dropdown on the lead.
2. 2A proposal has to have gone out first. The one exception is a business running the Maintenance module, where a deal can be won with no estimate at all.
3. 3The confirmation offers the next step: Convert turns the accepted estimate into a project, and Send plan (Maintenance only) opens a service plan for the customer to sign.
4. 4The card sits in the Won column until it is converted, then it moves over to Projects.

Lost deals stay on the board for 30 days and then roll off it. They are not deleted: they stay in the Leads list and in your reports, which is what makes win rate and lost-reason reporting worth reading.

1. 1Drag the card to Lost, or pick Lost from the stage dropdown on the lead.
2. 2The Mark as Lost box asks why. Tap one of the five common reasons (price, timeline, went with another builder, project postponed, unresponsive) or type your own.
3. 3Click Mark Lost. The reason is saved on the lead and written into the timeline entry for the move.

Landlords, property managers and repeat customers often have several job sites. A contact keeps a list of Saved addresses, separate from their own billing address, and each lead is filed at exactly one of them.

1. 1Open the contact and click Add address under Saved addresses. A saved property needs a street, a city and a state so it is dispatchable. Give it a Label like "Rental" if that helps you tell them apart.
2. 2When you file the next lead for that person, pick the site from the Property dropdown. If they have exactly one saved property, it is chosen for you.
3. 3Type a new address instead and it saves itself as one of their properties, so the lead after that gets the picker. An identical address is reused rather than duplicated.
4. 4While typing a new address you can record Owner-occupied and Dwelling units. Both are optional, and blank means not recorded. Managolio keeps these on file because some states' home-improvement rules turn on them; it does not check any rule against them.
5. 5Removing a property never removes the leads filed there. Each one keeps showing the address it was filed under.

Coming from another CRM or a spreadsheet? The importer maps your columns for you and reports every row it could not take. Exports use the same columns, so a file exported from Managolio re-imports without losing anything.

1. 1For leads, open Leads and click Import in List view, or use the small menu at the end of the board toolbar and choose Import leads. For your address book, open Contacts and click Import.
2. 2Upload your CSV. The first row has to be your column headers. If you would rather start clean, click Template to download a file with the exact columns and one example row.
3. 3Check the mapping. Columns are guessed from your headers, so customer, cell, budget and dozens of other names are recognized. Fix anything it got wrong, or point a column at Don't import to leave it out.
4. 4Contact name and Email are required either way, plus Project / title for leads. Project type, Stage and Lead source accept the label you already use, and fall back to Other, New Lead and Other when blank or unrecognized.
5. 5A row whose Stage is Proposal Sent steps back to Site Visit on import, since there is no proposal behind it yet. Won does the same, unless you run the Maintenance module.
6. 6Run the import. You get an Imported and a Skipped count, with the row number from your file and the reason for every skipped row. Contact imports skip anyone matching an existing email or phone, up to 5,000 rows per file.

Deleting gets harder as real work piles up on a record, because that record is what your history is made of. Leads and Contacts are open to Owner, Operations and Estimator; Crew cannot reach either.

1. 1To remove a lead, open it, click Edit, then Delete. It takes the lead's notes, tasks, schedule events and loose files with it.
2. 2A lead with an estimate cannot be deleted, so delete the estimate first. A lead marked Won cannot be deleted at all until you move it out of Won.
3. 3To remove a contact, open them, click Edit, then Delete. A contact with any leads or projects cannot be deleted until those are gone.