CRM Boards: Every Enquiry, Opportunity and Quote on the Board It Belongs To

The CRM has been rebuilt around five boards. Two of them hold your leads, three hold your quotes, and between them they cover the whole life of a job: somebody gets in touch (or you go after them), you raise a quote, and it is either won or lost. The two outcome boards are new. They tell you what you lost, why you lost it, and what your win rate actually is.

Leads and quotes are different work

Open CRM in the main navigation and the tab bar is split into two sets, because a lead and a quote need different things from you. Under Enquiry boards there is Enquiries and Opportunities. Under Quote boards there is Quotes pending, Quotes lost and Quotes won. Each tab carries its own count, and the board you were last on is remembered, so a refresh does not dump you back at the start. The Enquiries tab carries a second badge as well, counting online enquiries nobody has opened yet, so a new one is never invisible while you are working on another board.

One filter sits above all five: manager, meaning whoever the enquiry or the quote is assigned to. Pick a team member, or pick Unassigned to turn up the work nobody has taken responsibility for, which is usually the more interesting question. The choice is remembered between visits. View customers in the top right takes you to the customer list when it is the customer rather than the pipeline you are after.

An enquiry is not a quote yet, and that is the point

Enquiries are the inbound board. Anything submitted through your online forms lands there filled in. Anything that arrived by phone you log yourself with New enquiry, and being able to log it half-finished is the whole idea. In most kitchens the person who answers the phone is not the person who prices the job. They take the date, the numbers and roughly what is wanted, it sits on the board as a record, and whoever picks it up starts from something better than a message on a notepad.

Until it becomes a quote, an enquiry is somewhere to gather. Add notes as you learn things. Attach their brief, a floor plan, last year's menu. Send emails straight from the enquiry, with every one you have sent kept on the record. Book as many follow-up reminders as the lead deserves, each one able to email the account, a named team member, an address you type, or nobody at all if you only want the date on the board.

Email is outbound only. When the customer replies it arrives in your normal inbox rather than back in Puree, which is what the two Puree AI buttons above the note box are for. Scan email takes their reply pasted in, however long and however much of it is signature blocks and quoted history, and returns a short note with the catering-relevant facts pulled out. Scan document does the same for a PDF or an image: a brief, a planner's timeline, a dietary list. Both cost AI credits, and both leave you a note you can edit before you keep it.

None of it is stranded once you raise the quote. The quote carries an Enquiry tab down its right edge, and one click reopens the original brief and everything recorded against it. Six weeks and four revisions later, what they first asked for is still one click away.

Opportunities: the work nobody is waiting on

An enquiry has a customer sitting at the other end waiting for a reply, which is its own kind of pressure and its own kind of prompt. An opportunity has none of that. Last year's Christmas party, a company's annual conference, an anniversary you heard about while packing down: nothing will arrive in your inbox to remind you, and if you forget, the work quietly goes to somebody else.

So opportunities get their own board, and instead of showing how long a customer has been waiting, it shows the dates you chose to reach out on. Set as many as you like. Something a year away might warrant one in six months to check the date holds, one a month out to make the call, and one a fortnight after that if you heard nothing back.

The fastest way to fill this board is from a job you have already done. Open last year's order and choose Log repeat opportunity: the customer, contact and event details come across, and the opportunity keeps a link back to the order it repeats, so when you quote it you can see exactly what they had and what they paid. Do it as you close off each event and next year's pipeline builds itself.

When one turns into a quote, it joins the same quote boards as everything else and is counted in the same reporting. Outbound work gets measured exactly like inbound work.

Quotes pending: the board that decides the other two

A quote sitting with a customer needs working as hard as the lead did, so Quotes pending carries the same kit: notes, follow-up reminders you can stack up, and an Add email button that turns a pasted reply into a note the same way the enquiry panel does. The table shows Last touch, Last emailed and when the quote expires, which between them make the neglected rows obvious at a glance.

Everything here eventually lands on Won or Lost, and how well it was chased is usually what decides which. Worth holding on to while you read the next two sections.

Quotes lost: what it cost you, and why

A lost quote used to be a dead end. It is now the most informative board in the app.

Open it and choose a period: 30, 60 or 90 days, 6 or 12 months, or all time. It starts at 90 days and remembers what you pick. Everything answers over that window, including the count on the tab, so a figure can never disagree with the chart above it. Four headline numbers lead: Value lost, Loss rate, Average lost quote and Reasons recorded. Each carries its working underneath, and beneath them the same story is written out in a sentence you could read aloud in a meeting.

Value lost over time splits every bar in two, deep rose for declined and pale for expired, and that split is the single most useful thing on the page. A declined quote is a customer who answered you. An expired one usually means nobody followed up in time. If your bars are mostly pale, you do not have a pricing problem, you have a chasing problem, and no amount of discounting will fix it.

Beside it, Why quotes were lost ranks the reasons, most common first, measured by count, because what you want to know is which objection keeps coming up. Expired / no reason given covers the quotes that simply ran out of time, and it ranks on size like everything else. If it tops your chart, that is the finding: you are losing work to silence rather than to price. A greyed No reason recorded sits below everything, for declined quotes nobody has annotated yet, and that is the row to shrink.

Fill in the reasons as you learn them

A customer declining online can pick a reason, but plenty skip the question, and a quote that simply ran out of time never had one to give. So the reason is editable directly on the board, from the same four options the customer sees — no longer required, pricing exceeded budget, menu options did not appeal, received a more competitive quote — and it saves the moment you choose. Learn the real answer on a call a week later, and you can put it in then.

Because your answers and the customer's use the same four options, the breakdown stays on one vocabulary and the bars stay comparable. What a customer told you when they declined is theirs and stays as it is; the ones you fill in afterwards are yours to change. The Reasons recorded figure tells you how complete the picture is, which is worth watching: a breakdown built on a tenth of your losses is a hint, not a finding.

Quotes won, and an honest win rate

The same shape read the other way: Value won, Win rate, Average booking, and Still in play for the quotes from this period nobody has answered yet — which comes with a link straight to the pending board, since that number is a to-do list rather than a statistic. The breakdown here is Where the wins came from, by type of job, and it is measured by value rather than count on purpose. Eight deliveries and eight staffed events are the same number and nothing like the same business, so counting them would flatten the exact difference you are looking for.

Both rates are asked of the quotes you raised in the period, not the decisions that happened to land in it. That is the honest way to read a quarter: it tells you how the work you sent out that quarter actually went. Quotes still waiting on an answer are held out of the rate and reported next to it, as 834 decided · 37 still pending. A month full of unanswered quotes therefore neither flatters your number nor dents it, and the rate settles as the decisions come in.

Comparing average lost quote with average booking is often the fastest read on your quoting. If the jobs you lose are consistently bigger than the ones you win, that is worth a conversation about how you price at the top end.

Which date you are looking at

On Lost and Won the date column reads Lost on or Won on: the day the customer answered you, not the day of the event. That is deliberate, because these two boards measure your quoting rather than your calendar, so a Christmas function accepted in June belongs in June. The event date is still there in the row's panel. On the other three boards the date column is the event date, because while a job is live that is the one you are working to.

Both charts are built in plain HTML and CSS rather than a charting library, so they match the rest of the app, they do not wait on a second script to draw themselves, and they print properly. The figures are worked out when you open the board, since every quote in the window has to be priced to produce them, so on a wide period expect them a moment after the table.

One panel, wherever you meet a customer

Clicking a name opens a panel over the board rather than navigating away, and if that quote began life as an enquiry you get the enquiry's panel. Notes taken while chasing, emails sent, follow-ups booked: all in one place, whichever board you happen to be standing on. You are never reading half a history because the record moved from one board to the next.

Nothing to set up

It is on every account now. Open CRM in the main navigation. Your existing quotes are already on the right boards, and the lost and won figures cover your whole history from the day you started, so you can pick All time and see how last year really went.

The one thing worth doing by hand is going back over recent losses and filling in the reasons you know. It takes a few minutes and it is what turns the breakdown from a curiosity into something you can act on.

For full guides, see our CRM Boards help page, Processing Enquiries help page and Opportunities help page.

As always, if you have questions or feedback, reach out to us at email@puree.app.