Clients, opportunities and your pipeline

A client is a company or person you work for. An opportunity is a specific piece of work you're hoping to win from them — which is why the pipeline stage sits on the opportunity, not the client: you win a project, not a company, and one client can have several deals running at once.

Adding a client

Clients → New client. A name and a type (individual or business) is enough to start; the wizard then offers a logo, address and contact details, all skippable.

For UK businesses, Look up company finds them by name or number and fills in the registered address, company number and — if you want — a director as the main contact. You can also pull their logo straight from their website.

Short name. What you call them out loud — RED for Rare Earth Digital, JG for JG Creative. Set it on the client's edit page and it is used wherever there isn't room for the whole name: calendar bars, board cards, the "needs you" list on your dashboard. Anything the client themselves sees — a quote, a statement, their share page — always uses the full name, because a nickname on an invoice reads as carelessness.

Other work. A client's page has a section for named work you don't run as a project here — "Aria", "Birkdale", a retainer. These are just names with an owner: no phases, no tasks, no dates. They exist so you can file things against them, and so AI filing recognises them — write "Birkdale renewals" on your list and it can tell that belongs to Rare Earth Digital. Archive one when a strand finishes and it stops being offered, but anything already filed against it still says what it was about.

Colour. Give a client a colour on its edit page and every project for that client carries it — a dot on the projects list and the project header, and a Colour by project option on the account calendar. A project can pick its own colour in Project settings to stand apart from the client's.

Opportunities

On a client's page, add an opportunity: a title, a value, an expected close date and a pipeline stage.

Stages run Lead → Contacted → Proposal sent → Negotiating → Won / Lost. Drag cards between stages on the Opportunities board, or change the stage on the client page.

Record a lost reason when one doesn't land. It costs a moment and it's the only way the pipeline report can tell you why you're losing work.

Winning one

Set an opportunity to Won and Waymarq creates the project for you — carrying across the client, the title and the value as a fixed fee — then takes you into the project setup wizard. If you accepted a quote, that happens automatically (see Quotes).

Any brief you attached to the opportunity moves across to the new project's Files, so the document you quoted against is right there when the work starts.

Keeping in touch

Log calls, emails, meetings and messages against a client or a specific opportunity. Set a next follow-up date and anything overdue surfaces on your dashboard, so a deal doesn't go quiet by accident.

Breaking the work down before you quote

To price a job properly you want the work listed, not a number plucked out of the air. Each opportunity has an Estimate: a list of what needs doing, with hours against each line.

Two things then happen from it, and neither means retyping the job:

• Draft a quote turns the estimate into quote lines priced at your organisation's default hourly rate. It's an ordinary draft, so adjust anything before you send it.
• Winning the deal turns the estimate into the project plan — a phase called "Quoted work", with a task per line, carrying your wording and your hours across. Those hours become the task estimates the schedule is built from.

That last part is the point. Everywhere else the quote and the plan are separate documents, so the job gets written out twice and the second version quietly drifts from what the client agreed to.

A line with no hours on it is fine — "we'll need to do this, no idea how long yet" is a real answer. It's flagged as unsized so a low total is explained rather than misleading, and it still appears on the quote rather than being silently dropped.

Time spent chasing it

A client asks whether something is possible, you spend an afternoon working it out, you send a quote — and more often than not it goes nowhere. Those hours were still real, and most tools have nowhere to put them.

Log them against the opportunity itself: on the client page, each opportunity has a Time spent row. It takes the same shorthand as everywhere else — 2h, 45m, 1d 3h — where a day is your organisation's working day.

None of it is billable and none of it touches a project. It exists to answer one question, which the pipeline report answers for you: how much of your time goes into work that never lands?

What you get back

The pipeline report turns all of this into: open pipeline by stage, win rate, why deals were lost, a forecast by expected close month, average deal size and average days to win. Two definitions worth knowing — win rate counts only decided deals (counting open ones would make a healthy pipeline look like failure), and average deal size uses won deals only.

It also shows time spent chasing work, split into hours on deals you won, hours on deals that didn't land, and hours still in play. Time on an open deal isn't counted as waste — it hasn't been decided yet, so it's invested rather than lost.