RiiPilot

Three levels, five stages, one colour rule

The three pictures below are the whole model. Everything else in this manual is one of them, written out.

Where things belong

How a deal moves forward

Why an address has the colour it has

An address is the company. An opportunity is one piece of business with it.

The address is permanent. It has a name, a postal address, contact people, a logo, and everything we ever did with it. It never ends, and it is never “won”.

An opportunity is finite: one particular mandate, one placement, one job being pursued. It has a beginning, an agent, an offer, its own interactions — and an end, won or lost.

Three things follow from that:

• One address can carry several opportunities, one after another or at the same time. A customer you won something with in 2024 is a new opportunity in 2026, not a revival of the old one.
• An address does not disappear when an opportunity starts. It stays in the address list — the opposite would mean a company does business only once in its life.
• “Won” means this piece of business was won. Not: this customer is ours now.

When do I start an opportunity?

As soon as there is a nameable occasion somebody is going after. Not when a company merely looks interesting — that is what the address is for. An opportunity without an occasion is an address with extra paperwork.

Writing down a contact

The window asks four questions, in the order you actually work: What and when · Who · What came of it · What happens next. Each is a quiet heading with a hairline, so the eye finds the one it wants instead of reading eleven labels of equal loudness.

Three things are needed rarely, so they sit on one line each until you want them: In one line, Attachments and They asked for time. The line says what is behind it — “none”, “2 files”, “until 15.01.” — and anything that has content opens by itself. A folded field hiding something you typed would be worse than a long window.

At a planned appointment half of it falls away: nothing has come of it yet, so that section and its heading are not there at all. A heading with nothing under it is a promise of nothing. It is in my calendar already exists only there — it is a statement about an appointment that is still to come.

The title says which of the two it is, and beside it stands only the way to the other one: Plan it instead, or It already happened. A button for what is already true would be a handle that does nothing.

The mail box — drop an .eml file, or paste a message out of Outlook — appears when the kind is Email. Pasting still works everywhere else: copy a mail into the text of a phone call and the tool still offers to take the date, the subject and the people out of it.

Room to write — and the report sheet

A visit is not a phone call: it needs more than four lines. The text box grows as you type, and ⤢ Room to write beside it pulls the whole window wide and gives you half a screen of writing space. Wide does not mean the lines run the full width — past about 80 characters prose stops being readable; it means more height, in a comfortable column.

Every record can be opened as a 📄 Report: a sheet with the company’s logo and address at the top, who was there from both sides, the text in full, the next step and the attachments. The heading follows the kind — Visit report, Call report, Video call report.

Print prints the sheet and nothing else: no menus, no buttons, no dark background, with a footer saying who printed it and when. Your browser’s print dialog also saves it as a PDF, which is why RiiPilot does not build one of its own.

Copy link gives you an address like …/?report=ix_… that opens exactly this sheet. Anyone who can use RiiPilot can open it — which was already true of the record itself; the link only saves them looking for it. Somebody without a RiiPilot login sees nothing.

Documents — and what an NDA has to do with them

Under Documents on a deal stands everything it has on paper: what we made for it, and what they handed us in a meeting — first figures, a balance sheet, a BWA. Three kinds, in one list, because the question is always “what do we have” and never “what did we upload versus link”:

• 📎 A file kept here, up to 12 MB.
• 🔗 A link to where it really lives — SharePoint, a shared drive. That is usually the better place: access rights, versions and retention are already settled there, and a BWA does not belong in our database and in every backup of it. RiiPilot shows the address; who may open it is decided over there.
• 📄 A handover on paper. A folder across the table, a printout. There is nothing to open; what is kept is that it happened.

Every entry carries one line saying what it is — and for a link or a handover that line is required. It is the part that survives: a link rots when the folder is moved, the file renamed, the sharing expired, the colleague gone. In two years, when the question is what exactly we received and under which agreement, the sentence “BWA 2024 and the Q2 figures, handed over on paper” is the answer. The file is evidence; the line is the record.

Each entry also says which way it came — from them or from us. It can be left open; an invented answer would be worse than none.

And that is where the 🔒 NDA comes in, under the address: an agreement covers the company, not one deal, so it is kept once and shows on every opportunity with them. Dates and a note, and the state follows from them: none · sent · in review · in force · expired.

“Sent” is the dangerous one, because it feels finished — you sent it, you ticked it off, and nobody looks to see whether it came back. So the moment a document on a deal is marked as coming from their side while no agreement is in force, Documents says so in ochre, above the list, where you are about to add the next one.

“In review” is the one that says somebody has the ball. They came back with questions or changes: that is not the same as silence, and it used to look the same — both were sent. One state that means two things says neither of them. It still protects nothing, and the ochre note still stands, until it is countersigned.

And the way back to the document. The path station NDA brings you here — but if nothing has gone out yet, what you need here is not four date fields, it is the document. So 📝 Prepare the document… stands beside the buttons and takes you into the deal, straight into the template window. It names the deal it will use: the one you arrived from, or the single open one with this company. With several it offers nothing and says so — a button that picked the wrong deal would build an NDA with the wrong purpose in its preamble.

Three buttons above the dates put today’s date in with one click — sent, they came back, countersigned — and light up to show which dates are filled, not that they happened today. Pressing one again clears it. The dates stay the truth: what happened last Tuesday is typed in, not clicked.

📝 From a template — the NDA, prepared

Under Documents, From a template… takes a Word file you have stored once and fills in what RiiPilot knows about this deal: the company, its address, the person who signs for them, and what the work is about. Out comes a .docx in your downloads — a real Word file, so their lawyer can write in it. RiiPilot does not send it; that stays with you and your mail program.

The template decides the form, not the program. The fields you see here are read out of the file you picked: anything written as {placeholder} becomes a field. A second template with different placeholders needs no change to RiiPilot, and a placeholder somebody removes stops being asked for.

What you leave empty is not quietly dropped. The placeholder stays in the document, highlighted, so the next person to read it sees what is missing. A gap you can see gets filled; one that disappears gets sent. The same reason an incomplete address is left out altogether rather than printed half.

“What the work is about” is a proposal, not a decision. It arrives filled with the deal name, and you should read the sentence it lands in before you send it — a deal name is a name, not a field of work.

How long it binds them after the talks end is asked every time, because it is a term and not a setting: § 9 of the NDA. The field is a number of years with 2, 3 and 5 one click away, and underneath stands the German sentence exactly as it will appear in the contract — the words are inflected for you, so “1” comes out as einem Jahr and not ein Jahren. Left alone you get the five years the template was drafted with. Two or three is the usual, but the program will not shorten a protection clause on its own.

The window does not stop at the download. Once the file is made it turns a page and asks what becomes of it: keep a copy under Documents on this deal (on by default — in a year that copy is the only thing that still says which wording went out, § 9 included), and whether it went to them today. Nothing is recorded until you press Done; the document itself is already in your downloads either way. The two steps after that — they came back, countersigned — are not asked here, because at that moment neither has happened.

Templates are managed in the same window, by whoever may manage settings. That is deliberate: a template is the wording everybody sends from tomorrow on.

👥 Brief somebody in

Beside Who is on this deal?. It does three things in one go: it builds a sheet of what has happened so far, sends it, and puts whoever you ticked on the deal.

The sheet is read, not written. The company with its address, who decides over there, the need, where the path stands and what is next, the chronicle in short lines, the documents with their one line each, the NDA, the offers — every one of those is already recorded somewhere, and the sheet only puts them in order. It invents nothing. The one thing on it that is not read is the line you write yourself, and that stands at the top, unchanged.

What you see is what goes out. The preview is built on the server, the same way the mail is — the browser does not draw its own version, because the second version is the one that is eventually wrong.

Documents are ticked one by one. Nothing travels unasked. A link or a note on paper cannot be attached — it has no file — so it is named on the sheet instead. And if something from their side is going out, the ochre line says so and says whether an NDA is in force: passing those on is the very thing an NDA settles. It is a warning, not a gate; RiiPilot still has exactly one gate, and it is the released price.

Who is on the deal is decided per person. Somebody from our roster arrives ticked, because whoever gets briefed usually works on it — and from then on they get the progress mail. Somebody from outside arrives unticked: no one outside the house gets internal post unless you say so.

The mail goes out from RiiPilot’s own account with a copy in the outbox, like every other mail it sends. First the post, then the entry: if sending fails, nobody is put on a deal they were never told about.

🧭 The path — what is next

The first tab on a deal. Eight stations, the way business usually comes about here: contact made · company details on file · first meeting held · need and decision-maker known · NDA exchanged · follow-up meetings · workshop · offer with the client. At the top stands the one line that matters: what is next.

Six of the eight are read, not ticked. A call in the chronicle, a need in the field, a countersigned NDA on the company, an offer in state sent — it is all already recorded somewhere, and the path only reads it in order. There is deliberately no checkbox beside them: a tick could say “first meeting held” on a deal whose chronicle holds no meeting, and the tick is the more comfortable of the two answers.

Nothing here is a gate. It shows what stands open; it never stops you saving or moving on. RiiPilot has exactly one gate, and it stays the only one: no offer goes to a client without the price being released.

It is a row of tiles. Click one and it opens below the row, with only the fields that station needs — Company details asks for a street, a town and one person you can reach, and nothing else. Click it again and it folds up. A tile is green when it is complete, ochre when it has been started and something is still missing (and it says what), grey when nobody has touched it, and dashed when it was set aside with a reason. There is no red: red means gone everywhere else in RiiPilot, and a station nobody has got to yet is not gone.

A station shows what it read. Under what this station reads stand the entries from the chronicle it looked at — day, kind, and beside each one whether it counts here. So a station can never again say “no meeting yet” over a chronicle that plainly holds one without saying why. The commonest reason is a meeting that is over and still down as planned: it has happened, nobody has said so. The button It happened stands right beside that line and is the same one as in the follow-up list — RiiPilot does not decide it for you, it asks.

The list folds open and shut at its heading. At an open station it starts open, because there it is the explanation; at a green one it starts shut and is headed What made this green — there the question is not why not, but with what. Every line is the way to its entry: click the day and the record opens, so you are never sent back to hunt through the whole chronicle for three lines the path already had in its hand. A line that belongs to the company rather than this deal is shown but does not open — it is not in this deal's chronicle.

A tile that sees something says so. Not every entry in the chronicle is a contact: a note is a note, and a planned call has not happened. But a station that stays open while entries sit right above it never leaves you guessing — it says what it saw (“three entries, but no call, email or meeting among them”, “two contacts so far, but no meeting in person or by video”) and goes ochre rather than grey. A day counts as a day, by the way: something logged this morning counts this morning, whatever time zone the server keeps.

The tick still is not yours to set. You fill in the fields; the tile turns green because the server read the data afterwards, not because you clicked. That is the whole point of the path and it has not changed — the tiles are the way in, not the tick.

The + adds a step of your own, between the others: a name, a line, and a day if you want one. It is the one tick you set yourself, and that is not an exception to the rule above but a consequence of it — a step that exists only here cannot contradict anything recorded elsewhere. Past its day, it goes ochre. Your own steps do not count towards x of 8: eight is eight, or the number would mean something different on every deal.

You never have to go looking for the gap. The station asks for what it is missing, in its own window: there is no longer a trip into the big address form to find out which of its boxes was empty. The line at the top opens the same tile — it is the line you read first, so it leads to the same place as the tile right under it, and not somewhere else. And on the home screen, under What is next, a row already names the station it is waiting on: clicking it opens the deal at that station, already unfolded. From “PRETTL · Exchange the NDA” to the box you type in is one click.

Six stations can be set aside — the first contact, company details, the first meeting, follow-up meetings, the workshop and the NDA — and only with a reason written in the box. A tick without a reason is indistinguishable from forgetfulness six months later. The need and the offer are not among them: without a need there is nothing to offer, and that holds for every deal.

A deal that grew out of an earlier one is why the first two can be set aside at all. A fourth phase for a client whose first three you delivered does not begin with make first contact — that happened years ago, in another deal. There the button says It happened before this deal…, with two answers ready: out of an earlier project, or we already know each other. Setting a station aside never claims anything about this deal's chronicle: it says the question does not arise here. And if a meeting does turn up in the chronicle, the meeting wins — what is recorded always beats what was set aside. When the company is already a client in FiiPilot, the station says so of its own accord, because that much RiiPilot can read; what follows from it, you say.

At the NDA the button says Handled otherwise… rather than Not needed, because it usually is needed — it just happens somewhere else. Two answers are there ready, since they are nearly always the same two: confidentiality is part of the order document, or it is done later, in the project, which means FiiPilot carries it. The free box stays beside them for everything else. What is set aside here is only the question on this path: the agreement itself still lives on the company, where it belongs, and the next deal in two years asks again. A separate answer, no NDA needed with this company, still sits in the address — that one is about the company and silences the question for good.

The workshop is the only station with a state of its own, because it is often pro bono and so appears in no invoice anywhere. Record the day, the effort in days, whether it was free, and which meeting in the chronicle it was. The meeting stays an ordinary meeting — that matters, because the premium is counted off the record and a new kind of record would have quietly stopped paying it.

Its third state is after the order — in the project. Then it is neither held nor still open: it has moved to the other side of the order, and its days are counted in FiiPilot. Booking it as held would be a lie — it has not happened; leaving it open would be waiting for something that, by agreement, happens elsewhere. Day, effort and pro bono stay empty, so that no number stands here that is counted again over there.

A revenue share, counted in years

Beside until on the company stand 1 year · 2 years · 3 years. They count from the day the first deal with this company was opened — the share belongs to the company and covers every deal with them, so there is no single opportunity to count from; there is the one the business started with.

What gets saved is the day, not the term. If the record held “3 years”, the end would quietly move whenever the beginning moved, and nobody could look up when it actually runs out. The buttons are a slide rule, not a state — and the line underneath always says which day was counted from, so the date is never a number out of nowhere.

No deal with the company yet? Then the buttons say so and stay out of it. The day the address was added would be a different fact: an address can sit in stock for a year before business comes of it. Typing a date by hand works as it always did.

On the start page the same reading runs across every open deal: which are waiting on what, furthest-along first. A deal in negotiation with no NDA is more worrying than a fresh one with everything open — on the fresh one it is normal, on the far one it is an oversight.

The seven stages

A stage stands on something you can point at, not on a feeling. The moment “Qualified” means “feels promising”, three people grade the same deal differently and the funnel stops telling you anything.

The first two are not a deal yet. A record at Not started or In conversation is something being worked on, not something being sold: it is counted on the start page as stock, and it carries no plan revenue and no funnel figure. The business begins at Qualified, because that is the first stage that rests on two facts instead of on hope.

Won and Lost leave the funnel and the open tiles; they sit in the folded-up sections below the active deals. Setting a deal to Won offers Convert to Client, which is what creates the customer over in FiiPilot.

Every stage can be set by hand at any time by clicking the stage bar. The automatic rules only ever fill in what nobody has got round to.

What happens by itself

Three stages can be read off the record, so the tool sets them:

• Not started → In conversation — the first contact record of type call, email, meeting or video call. A note deliberately does not count: a note to file is not a conversation.
• In conversation → Qualified — see the next chapter. This is the one step the tool will also ask about, because it is the one that turns work into a deal.
• anything → Proposal — an offer is created.

The rules fire after you did something — a saved deal, a saved contact record — never when you merely open a deal to look at it. A tool that quietly rewrites what you are reading is a tool nobody trusts.

Getting to Qualified

Qualified is the stage that decides whether the funnel is worth anything, so it hangs on two facts that are visible in the record. Both have to be there:

• Somebody who decides. In the address, each contact person has a decides tick next to active. It sits on the person, not on the deal — whoever decides at that company decides for every piece of business with them. Marked people carry a small violet decides label wherever they appear.
• The need, written down. In the opportunity, the field What do they need? above the notes. That one belongs to the single deal, not to the company: “two SAP consultants from October, six months, on site in Hamburg”.

If contact people are ticked for this deal, only those count. If none are ticked yet, every active contact of the address counts — otherwise marking the boss as deciding would do nothing until somebody ticked them on the deal as well.

Both present, and the deal moves up the next time it is saved. Nothing is enforced: you can set Qualified by hand without either, and nothing will take it away again.

The question after the meeting

Those two facts usually come out of the first real conversation, and until somebody says what came of it the record sits at In conversation and counts in nothing. So once a call, video call or meeting on that deal has taken place, the deal itself asks, in amber at the top: Is there something here? — Yes puts it at Qualified, No at Lost.

It is a question and not a rule because only the person who was in the room can answer it. It appears for a meeting that actually happened, never for one still in the diary, and it stays until it is answered: the number Met already beside the funnel row is how many are waiting. If that number grows while the funnel does not, somebody is making calls without ever deciding.

Common questions

How long does something stay New?

There is no time limit, on purpose. A stage says what has happened, not how long ago. A deal nobody has touched in three weeks is not further along — it is neglected, which is a different thing and does not belong on the same scale.

In practice New ends at the first call. If a deal does get stuck there, that is a visibility problem, and the worksheets are the answer: Follow up picks up anything that has been quiet for a fortnight, New included.

How do I get an email in here?

From Outlook: open the message, select all, copy, and paste it into What came of it. Outlook copies its header along — Von/Gesendet/An/Betreff or From/Sent/To/Subject — and RiiPilot offers to take the date, the kind and the people out of it. Nothing is changed until you say so.

With attachments: drag the message to the Desktop first and drop that .eml file on the box. Then the files come along too. Dragging straight from a mail program into the browser hands it nothing: the file is only created when something asks for it, and a web page cannot ask.

Filing a message — to a deal, or to the company

File it in the inbox offers the open deals first and, under No deal yet, every company. A message belongs to a company; the deal is the extra that is often not there at all — a cold address has none, and neither has a customer you have not quoted for in a year. A company that already has an open deal appears only once, as that deal: otherwise the question „which deal?“ would be answerable with „none“.

Choosing a company opens the same record form as a deal does, with the message read in, the attachments taken over and the sender ticked — only without the two things a company does not have: nothing to pause (that belongs to a deal) and no choice between a report and a plan, because what is filed here has already happened. The next call gets planned on the calling board.

The record then stands in the company's own list of what happened — the same one that holds every logged call and every mail you wrote from the board. No opportunity is created. A reply is not a deal: that line is drawn where it always was, at the agreed meeting.

When does an address become a deal?

Not when somebody picks up the phone. A company on the calling list becomes an opportunity the moment a meeting is agreed — and that opportunity starts at In conversation, which is stock, not business. It is counted, it has its own row on the start page, and it appears in no funnel figure and in no plan revenue.

The business begins one step later, at Qualified, and somebody has to say so. After the call or the meeting has taken place, the deal asks Is there something here? and the answer decides: Qualified, or Lost. Before the conversation nobody can answer that honestly, which is exactly why the tool does not answer it for you.

The point of the line is arithmetic. A deal at In conversation carried a chance of 25 % until this was changed, so ten first phone calls put a quarter of a made-up sum into plan revenue — and most of them evaporated at the first appointment. A plan revenue that includes deals nobody has judged is not a forecast, it is a wish.

The board — what a call looks like

The Cold calls page is a list of companies and nothing else. Everything you need while dialling stands on the board: a window over the whole screen, blue, in a rounded frame, with the company's logo in its head. Heading, tabs, filter, campaign band are out of the way, because while somebody is talking none of it is being used, and all of it was taking the room the number and the guide should have.

The stack — what you have taken on

Beside the list stands The board: the companies you mean to ring now, in the order you want them. Drag a row onto it, or press the ＋ at the end of the row; tick several on The whole list and ☰ Onto the board takes them all at once. Dragging one stack entry onto another moves it in front — the order is yours, not the sorting's.

Why it looks like a clipboard. It is the one surface in RiiPilot you are meant to put things on, so it is shaped like one: a steel clip reaching over the top edge, and slips of white paper lying under it. An object explains itself — a clip holding paper says without a word what the thing is for and that you may add to it. Before this it was a plain panel, correctly built and mute, and it looked like every other panel on the page. The shape says what it is; the colour says what it belongs to. It wears the same blue ground and the same dark head as the work board that opens when you call, because you drag a company from the one straight into the other — two things that run into each other should look like one.

A slip carries the name and nothing else. Contact person, number of attempts, who it belongs to, the ✉ for a company you wrote to — all of that stands in the list you drag from, and all of it opens the moment you click the company. A board covered in particulars would be a second list, and you would read everything twice. An empty board shows a blank sheet saying what belongs on it; once something lies there, that free space grows back while you drag — you have to be able to see where a thing goes before you have it in your hand.

Why a stack at all. The column inside the board used to show everything still open in the campaign, and that is a supply, not a session. Working companies off one after another only means something when the set has an end: 2 to go. Start calling opens the board at the first one; logging a call moves straight to the next one on the stack.

One board per day. The tabs above the stack say which day you are filling — Today, Tomorrow, and the date field beside them for any other. Put a company on it and the board for that day exists; take the last one off and it is gone again. There are no empty compartments to keep tidy, only the days you have actually planned. Whatever is still open on a past board moves into today by itself, because plans are not something anybody tidies up.

And one board per campaign. Under the day tabs the boards stand one below the other, each with its own name burned into its clip: Uxo, Valboo, and No campaign for the cold one-offs. You never choose which board a company goes on — a company stands in exactly one campaign, so it knows. Tick twenty rows from three campaigns and press ☰ Onto the board, and they fall onto three boards by themselves. While you drag one, only the board it is going to lights up; if that campaign has no board for the day yet, the board appears while you are dragging, name already on it.

Each board has its own Start calling, and it runs through that board alone — a block of Uxo, then a block of Valboo, with one script in your head at a time rather than two. The head of the work board says which one is running. Clear likewise empties the one board it sits on; other campaigns and other days keep theirs. Pick a campaign in the Campaign field at the top and only its board stands there; the day tab then counts only what you can see.

Folding a board away

The small ▾ at the left of a board’s head folds it into one strip: the campaign, and how many are still to go. Clicking the name does the same. Your browser remembers which boards are folded, per day and campaign; a colleague you hand a board to finds it open. An empty board cannot be folded — it is the invitation to put something on it.

Who did it — when somebody else was on the phone

On the calling card, above the four outcomes, stands Who is on the phone. It is filled in with the cold caller of that address — whoever’s list the company is on usually calls it. If you are writing down what a colleague did, pick them: the call, the meeting and the premium then count for them, and the record still says that you wrote it down. Two questions that used to be one.

The same question stands in the record window, at a company from the calling list and at a deal that grew out of one: Who did it. That is where a record already saved can be put right — and the line beneath says what the choice means: it counts for the premium, or nobody earns on it because whoever did it is not the cold caller of that address.

What is behind a number. In What it earned, clicking a person’s row opens exactly their items: what it was, which company, when, and whether it is due, still ahead, or waiting to be written up. The line above says whose items are open and how many make up the sum; Everybody’s items goes back to all of them, and each item row with a deal behind it opens that deal. A premium you can only see as a total is one nobody can check.

Until 23.09.2026 this was not just missing, it was broken: the premium compared the address’s pool number with the account number of whoever typed the record. Two kinds of number that can never be equal, so every item fell out and What it earned stayed empty even for somebody who had made the call and written it down himself. Both are fixed, and old records count as soon as the month is looked at again.

Handing a board to a colleague

Build the board as you always do — pick the day, drag the companies on, put them in order — and press Hand over… in its head. Pick the colleague, and the box says beforehand what will happen, in three sentences: the board leaves your column and lies on theirs, for the same day and campaign; the companies become theirs, on their list and no longer on yours; and you keep seeing how far they get.

Tell them by email is a tick, with a suggested subject and text you can change. RiiPilot sends it from its own mail account, like the notices to a deal captain, and a copy goes into the outbox. If the colleague has no address in the consultants pool, the tick says so instead of standing ready. If the mail cannot go out, the board is handed over all the same — and the line afterwards says plainly that the email did not go, and why.

Only colleagues whose RiiPilot login is linked to the consultants pool can receive a board; somebody without a login would have nowhere to open it. On their side the board says from Jörn Werner under its name. It is their board from then on — they can reorder it, take a company off, work it — and under your own boards stands Handed over: who, for which day and campaign, and 12 of 20 worked · 6 still open · 2 taken off, with the names of what was taken off. Worked counts calls actually logged since you handed it over, not ticks on the board: a tick goes with yesterday’s board, a logged call stays under Interactions.

A browser that was opened before you handed the board over cannot wipe it by saving its older state: until their page has seen the board, RiiPilot puts it back. Once they have seen it, what they do with it counts.

A company lies on at most one board. Drag it to another day and it moves there rather than appearing twice — otherwise it would stand on Thursday and on Friday, and you would ring twice or not at all. The ✓ at the end of its row says which day it is waiting on, and clicking the company opens the board on that day. A board that has run empty is gone; there is nothing to tidy.

Your plan and the company's date are two different things. If the deal is waiting for a later call-back than the day you put the company on, the entry says so — ↻ call-back 18.11.2026 — and changes nothing. Neither date overwrites the other; one tells you about the other, and you decide.

Logged means ticked off, not gone: the entry drops to the bottom with a line through it, so you can see what you have done. Moving a call to a later day counts as handled too — you decided.

Nothing here deletes anything. The − at the end of a stack entry takes that one off the board; Clear takes them all off, and asks first with a number. In both cases the companies stay on the calling list exactly as they were, and what you logged stays logged. That is why the sign is a minus and not a red cross: in RiiPilot red means gone, and nothing goes here.

The stack belongs to you, not to the company. It survives reloading and the night, each person has their own, and nothing else in RiiPilot knows about it — not the funnel, not the reports, not the address. It is a stack of cards on a desk, not a folder in a cabinet. Clicking a company straight from the list still works: it goes on the stack and the board opens on it.

Notes are big here, because this is where you write while you talk. The field grows into whatever room is left, and what stands in it goes into the record with whatever you log, whichever outcome you choose afterwards. The board stays until the stack runs out or you close it — the × in the head, or Escape.

The guide hangs on the right and folds away. The narrow spine at the edge closes it and opens it again; folding it gives the room to the notes. It comes back open with every new call, because folding it away was about that one conversation. Where a campaign has no guide there is no spine either — a control that opens nothing is a lie about how the thing works.

How far they are — and what came in last

Above The whole list sits a row of stages, each with its number in the campaign and for the person picked above: New (never tried), Contacted (tried, or information sent), First conversation (spoken to somebody there), Closing (a meeting with a consultant or partner agreed) and Out (turned us down, or a dead number). They are the same states that stand on the right of every row, only grouped.

Last import picks exactly the companies of the most recent file. That is the way out when a list has landed in the wrong campaign, or in none: Last import → All → Campaign…, and the whole file moves in one go. Files read in from 21.09.2026 on carry a mark of their own; for older ones, what one person put in within a few minutes of each other counts as one load.

When you import, the window fetches the campaigns afresh and shows the closed ones too, marked as such — loading into a closed campaign opens it again. Before anything is written it says where the list will go, and Into no campaign is said just as plainly. Afterwards the board opens on exactly what you loaded.

When the phone does not do it — email and post

Under the four outcomes of a call there is a second, quieter line: Not getting through? ✉ Write to them · ✉ A letter by post. They are not among the four on purpose — those four are what a conversation came to, and these two are what you do when no conversation happens.

The mail is laid out for you, and you send it. Pressing Write to them fills in the person the call is about, the subject and the text from the campaign, and a blind copy to RiiPilot's own drop box — so the mail itself comes back and lands under Interactions at this company. Open it in my mail program hands all of that to your mail program; you read it over, change what you want and send it from your own address. RiiPilot sends nothing, which is why the second button says Log it — written and not „sent“. Two steps, because they really are two things, and a tool that claimed to have sent something it did not is a tool you stop believing.

The text belongs to the campaign, for the same reason the guide does: you write forty of these and they are nearly the same. It is written behind the ⚙ beside the campaign field, once. Four things get filled in per company — {company}, {name} and {firstname} of the person, and {me}, your own name. One that has nothing to fill it stays standing as it is: a gap you can see is a gap you close, one that quietly disappears is one you send.

A day to come back to is compulsory here — a week for a mail, a fortnight for a letter, and you can change either. On the phone the date may be left out, because you have just spoken and you know where you stand. Writing is different: an answer comes or it does not, and only that date brings the company back. Something written without one is something forgotten.

It counts as an attempt, and it does not earn the premium. Five attempts without success say something about an address whichever way they were made, so the counter moves. Contact made is the other matter: for that a person has to have been on the line. The line under Interactions therefore reads Wrote to them — b.boss@firma.de and never begins with the word the premium is counted by.

The company is ticked off on the board like a logged call — you are done with it for today — and the list marks it with ✉ written so you do not ring the next morning and wonder why they already know. The letter is the same road: RiiPilot prints nothing, it shows you the postal address to copy and notes that it went out. If street or town are missing it says so rather than showing half an address — half an address looks like information, and it comes back as an envelope.

The guide — what the caller reads from

Each campaign carries its own: a text to work down while dialling, and the questions to get answered in the call. It stands open on the board for every call in that campaign — not behind a button, because a guide behind a button is not opened on the third call.

The email text lives there too, under the guide: the subject and the letter that go out when the phone does not do it. Same reason, same place — written once, used forty times.

Where it is written. The ⚙ beside the campaign field. If a campaign is picked there, it opens straight on that one; if the field says Every campaign, it asks which one first — a form that does not say what it belongs to is a form you fill in for nothing. One screen at a time: pick, edit, or the general questions. The campaign's name stands at the top, so there is never a doubt about what is being changed.

Dropping a file on it. The dashed strip under the text box is where it goes — or Or choose one… beside it, for anyone who would rather not drag. A .docx is read right there and its text goes into the box, yours to edit from then on — the point is that it stands on the screen while you talk, not in a second window. A PDF cannot be read that way, so it is kept beside the guide and one click opens it during the call. The old .doc format cannot be read at all; save it as .docx. A file needs a campaign to belong to, so a brand-new campaign has to be saved before a PDF can be dropped on it.

General questions and this campaign's own. The classics come up in every call — who decides, the assistant, the direct line, the email. They are written once, under The general questions, and they stand in every campaign, new ones included, without anybody having to think about it. A campaign where one of them does not fit unticks it on its own page; that leaves it out there and nowhere else. On the phone the general ones come first and the campaign's own follow under a line — which is the order of the call: past the switchboard, then to the point.

An answer that belongs in the address. Durchwahl, email, who decides — those are facts about the company, not about one call. A question can therefore carry a target field (typed-in questions only; an address field takes a sentence, not a tick list). While dialling, the guide then offers the answer for the address: „Direct line: 02521 249“ with a tick and one button. Nothing is written until somebody clicks — a tool that quietly edits an address is a tool nobody trusts.

It goes to one person, and the line It’s about above the questions says who: somebody already on the address, or somebody new that the answer to „who decides?“ brings into being. A new person needs a name — a phone number with nobody attached is not a contact. Answering who decides also marks them as deciding, which is half of what qualifies a deal.

A field that is empty is ticked by default; one that already holds something else is not, and the line says what would be replaced. Filling a gap cannot destroy anything; overwriting can. The switchboard is the one target that belongs to the company rather than to a person.

The general questions are edited in one place and nowhere else. Change the wording there and it changes in every campaign, which is what makes them worth having; that is also why they cannot be edited from inside a campaign, only switched off.

The questions come in three kinds. Typed in for answers that are different every time; pick one where the answer belongs in a box; pick any where several boxes are true at once. Only the picked ones can be counted later — „12 of 40 said they are thinking about it“. Free text cannot be counted, and is often the truer answer; a guide usually wants both.

Nothing is compulsory. A question nobody can answer honestly gets answered with a tick that means nothing, and a number built on those ticks is worse than no number.

Where the answers go: both places, and for two different reasons. They are saved on the company as you type — so they survive a call that breaks off before anything is logged, and so they can be counted per campaign. And when you log the call, they are written into the contact record underneath what happened, because that is where somebody reads the story of the call three weeks later. The one-line summary in the list stays the one line it always was.

Changing the wording of a question keeps the answers already given; deleting a question deletes them, since an answer without its question is a value nobody can say what it answers. A longer document can hang beside the text as a link — it opens in its own window, so the call is not interrupted.

What they said — counting the answers

Under How it is going there is a third section beside What it brought and What it earned: 💬 What they said. Pick the campaign at the top and every question of its guide stands there, each with what came back — „12 said Ja, 5 said Nein“. This is the promise the campaign editor has been making since the first question was written; here it is kept.

Two numbers, and both are named. The bars count against the companies that answered that question; the line above says how many of the whole campaign answered at all — 18 of 40. One number alone would mean something different to every reader, and the difference matters: somebody who did not answer did not say no. A count that mixes the two invents refusals that nobody made.

Every number opens. Click a row and the companies behind it stand there by name, each one a step away from its address. Same rule as the premium: a number you can only see as a total is a number nobody can check — and „12 said yes“ turns into a list of twelve companies to ring.

An answer nobody gave still has its row, with a nought. That a box stayed empty is information; dropping it would make the question look as though it had never been asked. And an answer that is no longer on offer — because somebody changed the choices later — keeps its count under was asked differently: changing a question does not change what forty companies said.

Typed-in answers are read, not counted, and they stand underneath with the company and the day, newest first. They are often the truer answer. A company that has since moved to another campaign still counts here, because here is where it was said — and the line at the top says how many those are, rather than quietly flattering the result.

Cold calls and Addresses — what is the difference?

One pile, one switch. Every company is an address; the switch says whether it is on the calling list. Cold calls counts the ones that are, Addresses the ones that are not. Nothing is ever in both, and nothing is counted twice.

The switch flips by itself at the one moment that matters: when a call ends in an appointment agreed, the address comes off the list and joins the addresses, and the deal that appointment belongs to is created at the same instant. That is also the moment the premium for the call is earned. Everything else — nobody there, call again, no interest — leaves it where it is.

The three sums beside the funnel — where do they come from?

Potential, against the Addresses row, is the “Potential for us” from every address profile added up. It measures the field, not the pipeline: every company on file counts, whether anything is running there or not, so it only ever grows. The company's own revenue figure has nothing to do with it — that is a size, not a chance.

In play, against Qualified, is every open deal added up: the quoted amount where an offer has gone out, and the estimate on the deal where none has. This is the one that answers “what is actually running”.

Out, against Proposal, is the narrower half of that: only the offers actually with a customer, at the amount quoted. It is part of the sum above, not on top of it.

Read downwards they are the field, what is running on it, and the part of that we have put a price on. Hover over any of them and the tooltip says the same thing.

New business or repeat business

In the reports, beside deal captain, industry, topic, agent and referrer, there is New vs repeat: two rows, and between them every deal and every euro — what came from companies we had already won, and what came from companies we had not.

It is read, not ticked. A deal counts as repeat business when an earlier deal with the same company was won — earlier by the day the deal was opened, which is the only date that is reliably recorded. Open a deal and the line under its name says which of the two it is and what that is read from, naming the earlier deal and its day. So nothing here is an opinion you have to trust.

There is one case the reading cannot see: a client older than RiiPilot, whose first project only ever existed in FiiPilot. For that — and only for that — the line has a button to answer by hand. It then says so, in those words, and one click puts it back to being read from the data.

Where do industry, revenue and potential go?

Into Profile in the address — they describe the company and hold for every deal with it. Industry comes from a list; if one is missing, the + puts it there for everyone, deliberately as its own step so that “IT”, “IT ” and “I.T.” cannot pile up next to each other. Revenue carries a year and whether it is estimated or confirmed — a number without that is worth little six months on.

Expected revenue sits on the opportunity instead, because it belongs to that one deal. It is an estimate; the offer amount is what was actually quoted. Where a deal has no offer out yet, the tile shows the estimate with a ≈ in front of it. Nothing is passed to FiiPilot from either — the project budget over there is entered by hand.

A reminder is due — where do I write down what I did?

In a new contact record, and the reminder itself has the button for it: Log what you did opens the deal and the dialog in one step, and ticking the record off closes the reminder. What you wrote in the reminder stays visible above the form while you type.

Why not simply into the reminder? Because a reminder is not a thing of its own — it is a date hanging on the contact record that produced it. That record says what happened on Tuesday. What you do on Friday is a new thing that happened, with its own date, its own people and possibly its own next step. Writing into the old one would rewrite Tuesday.

Just tick off is there for the case where nothing needs recording.

Who else is on this deal?

Under the agent there is a list of everybody else who belongs to this piece of business. Two kinds: from our team picks a name out of the consultant pool, someone else takes a name and an email address. Each of them is either works on it or kept informed.

It grants nothing. Anyone with a RiiPilot login already sees and edits every deal — with a handful of people, walling things off costs more than it is worth. The list answers two other questions: who belongs to this, and who should hear about it later, once RiiPilot can send mail. Somebody in the pool without an email says so in grey; they are a note, not an address.

Taking a person off ends their part in this one deal. They stay in the team list, and nothing already written down changes — what they did stays under their name.

Agent or introduced by — what is the difference?

The agent works the deal and is the one FiiPilot pays a commission to. Introduced by is whoever brought it to us without working it — no claim to anything, but the tool counts what each of them brings, so at the end of the year you know who to thank and roughly how much for. The number in brackets behind a name in that list is what they have brought so far.

Introducers are RiiPilot's own list. They are deliberately not in the consultant pool shared with FiiPilot, because they are not consultants.

Something happened, or something is planned?

The first thing the dialog asks, because everything under it follows from the answer. Something happened is a report: when it was, who was there, what came of it, the documents. Something is planned is an appointment: a date, a time, a length, who is coming and what it is about. No result, because there is not one yet.

They are the same entry in two lives, not two records. When the day comes, the appointment is in your tasks; Log what you did opens that same entry, switched to a report, and you write down what came of it. Planned becomes happened. Nothing is duplicated, and nothing is left hanging.

That is why the old field Follow up on is gone. A date stuck on a past record was never an appointment — it had no time, no length, nobody could be invited to it, and setting one on a record that was itself a follow-up produced a follow-up to a follow-up. Instead: write a next step into a report, and a second button appears beside Save — Save & plan the next step. It saves the report and opens the appointment straight away, with the same people, the same kind, the same sentence and a date a week out at ten o’clock, all changeable. It sits where you are already about to click, because that is a decision, not a footnote. The chain reads planned → happened → planned → happened.

Records that already carried an old-style follow-up date keep it and still show the field, so nothing gets lost. New ones do not get one.

Tasks and appointments are two different things

They used to stand in one list, and the list carried both meanings at once. An appointment is agreed: there is nothing to do but be there. A task may need working on today. So they are apart now — two panels on the start page, two tabs on the follow-ups page, and each with the steps that suit it. Tasks go Overdue · Next 3 days · Later; appointments go Today · Tomorrow · This week · Later, because an appointment cannot be overdue: it is agreed, or it has been.

An appointment that has passed is a task. Yesterday at two, nothing logged — that is no longer something you wait for, it is something to write up: what came of it? It therefore stands under Tasks, marked was agreed so you can see among the plain reminders that a real meeting was there, and it stays until you log it. If it stayed under appointments, the column that says „nothing to do here“ would be holding exactly the thing to do.

The badge on the bar and the reminder that pops up count tasks only. A badge is a nag, and nagging about a fixed appointment makes no sense; the appointments of the day stand in their own panel. The dividing line is drawn in one place in the tool, and both the page and the panels read it from there — four places each drawing the same line would eventually draw it differently.

Follow-ups in my own calendar

Two ways, and they are not the same thing. Add all to calendar (and the 📅 Calendar button on a single row) hands you a file: a photograph of how things stand right now. Import it twice and nothing doubles up — each date keeps its identity, so the second import corrects the first rather than adding to it.

Subscribe… is the better half: an address your calendar fetches by itself, roughly once an hour. Move a follow-up here and it moves there too, without anybody exporting anything. In Outlook: Kalender hinzufügen → Aus dem Internet abonnieren.

That address is a key, not a link: your calendar cannot log in, so whoever holds the address can read the open follow-ups. It is 64 random characters and it can be replaced in one click — Give me a new address kills the old one on the spot, and every calendar still pointed at it goes quiet.

A planned appointment travels as a real appointment: start, end, and the slot blocked as busy, with a reminder a quarter of an hour before. An old-style reminder has neither a time nor a length, so it stays all-day, does not block the day, and reminds you at nine the evening before — inventing a start time for it would be a claim, not a fact. Deals already Won or Lost drop out, so their dates do not sit in the calendar for ever.

An appointment that is in my calendar already

A customer sends an invitation, you accept it, and the appointment is in your calendar. You forward the message to RiiPilot — and if RiiPilot then put it into your calendar too, it would be there twice. No calendar program joins an appointment from a subscription to one of your own, not even when they are the same meeting, and RiiPilot cannot see your calendar.

What it can see is the invitation itself: it travels inside the message, with day, time, length, place and an identity of its own. When you file such a message, a line under the text says so — This message carries an invitation, Tue 03.11.2026, 10:00–11:00 — and the button becomes Save & take over the appointment. It saves the message as usual and opens the appointment already filled in; you look at it and save. It is marked in your calendar: it stays in every list here, but it does not go into your calendar a second time, and it has no 📅 Calendar button.

If the customer moves it and you forward the new invitation, RiiPilot recognises the same invitation and moves your appointment — nothing new is created. If they cancel, the appointment goes to the bin (you can bring it back from there), and the message stays under Interactions as the record of the cancellation.

For an appointment you arranged on the phone and put into Outlook yourself, there is the same switch by hand: It is in my calendar already, in the appointment. Tick it and it leaves the subscription at the next update, roughly within the hour.

Time and length of an appointment

When is two fields: a calendar for the day, and a small field for the time that you can simply type into. The ▾ beside it opens the full and half hours — the times people actually arrange to speak — already scrolled to where you are. Picking one fills the field and hands it back to you with the value selected, so 10:00 becomes 10:15 with two keystrokes.

Typing is forgiving: 9 is nine o’clock, 930 and 9.30 and 9:3 are all half past nine. Nonsense stays as you typed it rather than quietly turning into something else, and a record saved at 10:07 opens at 10:07.

How long works the same way and appears only for a call, a meeting or a video call — an email does not last, and a note is not an appointment. The list is full and half hours; Other… lets you type an exact number of minutes, and a record saved with 47 minutes still says 47 when you open it again. Left empty it stays empty: “nobody wrote it down” and “it took no time” are different statements.

The strip above the interactions

The whole deal on one line, right above the interactions it describes: every entry at the day it happened or is due, marked with the sign of the thing itself — the same 📞 ✉️ 🤝 📹 📝 you see in the list underneath, so there is no colour legend to remember. A dashed ring means it is planned and has not happened yet. The blue line is today, so the gaps to the left of it are the weeks where nothing was done.

Click one and you land on that entry in the list, unfolded and briefly highlighted. Hover shows what it was without going anywhere.

− and + change the scale; the word between them says what the axis is counting in at that moment — days, weeks, months, years — not which button you pressed, because a short deal fills the width at the coarsest setting anyway. Zooming keeps whatever is in the middle in the middle. Two entries a few hours apart stand one above the other on little stalks; zoom in and they move apart.

How do I delete an opportunity?

Three places, all of them asking the same question first. The × in the top right corner of its tile on the Opportunities page; the same × on its row under Opportunities inside the address; and, in the open deal, at the very bottom of Details. The crosses sit there in pale grey, take on an outline when you point at the row, and go solid red when you point at the cross itself — together with the row, so it is clear which one it would take.

In the open deal it is deliberately not up beside Done. That is the button you press to leave, twenty times a day; putting an irreversible one next to it is how accidents happen. It sits at the foot of Details instead, where the rest of the deal’s setup is, behind a line of its own.

The question lists what goes with the deal: its stage, its agent, how many offers and how many contact records. What stays: the address, the people at it, and everything we did with them. A deal somebody else currently has open has no cross at all.

Events — what happens without us

A contact is something we did. An event is something that happened to them: a new CFO, the owner looking to sell, forty jobs advertised, a piece in the paper. Both belong on the same thread, because the second explains the first — and often explains why now is the moment to call.

An event hangs on the company, not on the deal. „New CEO at Bergmann“ is true for every opportunity with Bergmann, so it is written once and shows up in all of them. Enter it wherever you happen to be: + Event above the interactions in the opportunity, or the Events tab in the address. Both write to the same place.

On the timeline events sit below the line, square, in sand; what we did sits above it, round. One look tells you which is which. In the list underneath they stand among everything else, marked the same way.

An event is never a contact. It moves no pipeline stage, it sets no „last contact“, and it does not wake a sleeping address — entering a press release is not the same as picking up the phone. Where it should lead to a call, Save & plan a call does both in one go: the event is filed and the appointment opens with it as the reason.

Say where it comes from. In six months the difference between „Handelsblatt, 25.06.“ and „heard over lunch“ is the whole difference.

In what order are the interactions?

By when things happened, newest first — not by when somebody typed them in. So a call you remember three days later drops into the place it belongs, below whatever happened after it. Those records say entered n days later, so their position does not look like a mistake. The dropdown above the list switches to entry order when what you want to know is what has been added recently.

The funnel on the start page

Every row is a way in: click one and the list opens showing exactly what that row counts. A stage takes you to Opportunities with only that stage on screen — a line above the tiles says so and offers Show all, because a filtered list that looks like the whole one is a trap. Addresses at the top opens the address list, Won opens the won group already unfolded.

The three sums on the right are in thousands of euros: a column of seven-digit numbers is not read, and the difference that matters is never in the last three digits. Potential is what all the companies on file are judged to be worth; In play is every open deal added up — the quoted amount where an offer has gone out, the estimate on the deal where none has; Offers out is the part of that which is actually quoted. Hover for the exact wording of each.

Contact people: folded, with a face

A company with twenty contact people used to fill the screen with twenty open forms. Now every card is folded and only the one being worked on is open — click a card to open it, click again to fold it. Opening one folds the other, because that is what „the one I am working on“ means. A new contact person opens straight away.

Folded, the line carries what is needed to find the right person: name, the mark saying who of us knows them, position and email address — and the three switches on the right stay reachable without opening anything.

A person read out of a text. Paste a signature, a business card or the end of an email into Make a contact from it and the fields come back filled — nothing is written until you press the button at the bottom. The one thing it cannot know is which company the person belongs to. From inside a company there is nothing to choose; out of the inbox it suggests one and says what the suggestion rests on — the web address, or the name under the signature. Nothing is preselected: at a large customer the same domain is often the wrong department entirely, and a guess that behaves like a decision is worse than no guess.

Under the suggestion stands every company on file, and above them a search: type the first letters. A word from the middle of a name is found too — müller finds Maschinenfabrik Müllers Söhne — but the ones that begin with what you typed stand first, because that is what you usually meant. The town searches as well: you often know where a company sits before you know exactly what it is called.

Into your own address book. The small .vcf button on the right of a contact’s line saves that person as a contact card — double-click the file and Apple Contacts or Outlook takes it over. On the card: name with salutation and title, company, position, email, phone and mobile, LinkedIn, the company’s switchboard (marked as the main number, not as the person’s line), its address and website. Private email and private phone stay off the card — a card gets passed on, and what is private should not travel with it by accident. What is on the screen goes on the card, including a number you have just typed. The way back works too: Import contact card (.vcf) reads such a card in again.

Each contact can carry a photo. Click the circle beside the number, choose a picture, done. It is cropped square and scaled to 320 pixels in the browser before it is sent, so a five-megabyte phone photo does not travel over the line for a circle thirty pixels wide. Where there is no photo the initials stand instead — never an empty circle. The small cross on the picture removes it again.

Who was in the meeting — and who of us knows them

The contact people of the company are the ticks at the top of a record. Underneath, + Someone else who was there adds the rest: somebody from our team, picked out of the consultants pool with their address, or somebody else entirely — a name, an email if there is one, and a line saying where they come from („Deloitte“, „the family’s lawyer“). As many as were there. All of them end up in the line that every list reads, so nowhere shows only half the room.

On a contact person themselves, Who of us knows them? answers a different question: not who they are, but what our way in is. One line per person of ours — several are normal, because you may know the CEO well while a colleague has only met him. Four steps, deliberately fixed rather than free text: knows them personally, well · has dealt with them a few times · has met them once · does not know them yet. Fixed, because the whole point is to be able to ask „who can open this door“ — and a sentence typed freely cannot be asked that question.

The box beside it is free, and that is where the useful part usually sits: from university, same golf club, ran a project together in 2015. The strongest connection shows as a green mark at the top of the card, so it can be seen without opening anything.

Websites, and companies that are part of a group

An address can carry several websites, each with a label saying which one it is: the group, the region, the unit we actually talk to. LKQ Corporation, LKQ Europe, LKQ DACH are three addresses on the web and one conversation — the label is what tells them apart, because the URL alone does not. Typing lkqcorp.com is enough; the arrow beside it opens the full address in a new tab. The first one also serves as the hint for finding the logo.

Ownership and Who do we work with? are two different questions, and they used to be squeezed into one. Vorwerk is family-owned and a group, and we deal only with the branches — as long as „Part of a group“ was an ownership form, one of those two sentences could not be said. Ownership now says who owns it; the field beside it says whether we are dealing with the whole company or with one unit of a group. Any ownership can be either.

Set it to One unit of a group and the group part opens: which group it belongs to, and which brands and companies belong to the group — Kobold, Thermomix, akf bank — a plain note, so that a name in a press release can be placed six months later. Nothing is calculated from it.

And the revenue is asked twice: once for the unit we deal with, once for the whole group. They answer different questions — how big is the house we are standing in, and how big is the room. Added together they would be neither. The field for the unit renames itself accordingly. Both figures keep their own how do we know and year, because a group figure out of an annual report and a unit figure guessed over lunch are not the same kind of number.

Taking the group setting away again does not delete the figures — they are simply not shown. Put it back and they are there. Addresses that were marked Part of a group before this field existed move over by themselves the first time they are opened: the group name goes into its own field, and the setting becomes One unit of a group, which is what it always meant.

What counts as „last contact“?

A call, an email, a meeting, a video call — something said to somebody. A note does not: it is our own memo about the deal, not a word with them, and a memo cannot make a company that has heard nothing for six weeks look alive. An event counts even less, for the same reason. So the dormant mark and the „last contact“ column measure what they say they measure.

Why is my address still in the list after I started a deal?

Because the company has not gone anywhere. The row shows how many deals are running and how far the furthest of them ever got — the same measure the colour and the filters use, so a customer you won last year stays green even while a fresh lead on the same company is only just starting.

What does the turquoise FiiPilot mark mean?

This company is already a client in FiiPilot. Where the address was actually taken over from there, the company name and postal address belong to the client record and are read from it every time — not copied. Correct them in FiiPilot and they are correct here at the next look, with nothing to synchronise.

What is still blank over there you can fill in here: those fields stand open and tinted turquoise, and what you type goes into the client record when the address saves. Filling a gap cannot destroy anything — overwriting an invoicing address from the sales side can, so a field that already carries something stays read-only and is corrected in FiiPilot. The company name is never editable here at all: both systems are matched by it. If somebody has that client open in FiiPilot at that moment, nothing is written and the line under the button says so.

Why is there no “New” in the funnel any more?

Because it was never progress. A deal at New is one that has been written down and not begun — and since In conversation sets itself at the first call, it usually lasts minutes. Above the stages the funnel already counts every address on file, so a second, nearly empty top row said the same nothing twice. The deal still starts there; the pill just says Not started, which is what it means. The line under the funnel says how many are sitting in it.

Where that number does earn its place is Intake on the start page: how many addresses and how many deals each person brought in over the last 30 or 90 days or this year, how many of those were actually begun, and how many got as far as an offer. Counting only what was added would reward typing in names; counting what moved as well is the honest picture. It is counted by agent — whose company it is. Who typed a record in is a clerical fact and can be anybody; it is shown beside the single record when you click a row open, not as a figure anyone is measured on. A deal that names no agent of its own counts under the agent of its company, the same rule a new deal follows when it takes its agent from the address. Records whose company has no agent yet gather in one row at the bottom — that row is a to-do list, not a person.

Does Won mean the customer has been handed over to FiiPilot?

No — those are two different things and the list shows them separately. Won (green) says this piece of business was won. The turquoise FiiPilot mark says the company is kept as a client over there. Handing one over is a later, deliberate step: the Convert to client button on a won deal.

So an address can be green without ever being turquoise — not every won deal gets billed as a mandate. And it can be turquoise without being green: an old client of FiiPilot's with a fresh deal here that has not been won yet.

The four lines above the address list

Each one carries one kind of thing, and nothing else. The heading line holds the page and what you can add to it: ＋ Add opens both ways in, a new address by hand or a company that is already a client in FiiPilot. The Bin stands beside it and not inside it — it adds nothing, it leads somewhere else.

The second line says which list you are looking at — Warm, On the calling list, All — and, on the right, in what order. The third says which stage of the pipeline within that list. The fourth belongs to the list as it now stands: narrow it by text, how many there are, and the two buttons that write exactly that out as a PDF or an Excel file.

The stage buttons, and the two that are not stages

They carry the colours of the rows they pick out, which is why there is no legend under them any more. Untouched (white) is an address with no deal on it at all; In progress (amber) is new, contacted or qualified; Bid/talks (light green) means an offer is with them or the terms are being talked through; Won is green. One at a time: every address is in exactly one of them, and together they are Every stage.

„We will talk again in two months“

A customer who asks for time is not a customer nobody is looking after. Until 20.09. the tool could not tell the difference: the deal went red after a fortnight and stayed red for eight weeks. A warning that is wrong for eight weeks teaches you to ignore it — and then you ignore the right one too.

The deal therefore carries the day itself: Pick it up again on, down in the opportunity beside What do they need?, with room for the sentence they actually said („budget only from January“). Until that day it is not counted as dormant and does not sit on Follow up — it waits there under the entries set aside, with its date, so it is never simply gone. The funnel and the figures do not change: the deal is running, it is just not overdue.

Where you set it is where you hear it. The mail that says „we will come back to you in two months“ is filed as a record — so the day is set in that same dialog, in the line under Next step. It is not a second field: what stands there is written onto the deal when you save, and the sentence underneath says so. It comes up filled in with whatever the deal already carries, so the next record does not quietly cancel a running pause — and clearing it there is how you end one early, when they come back sooner than they said. An agreed appointment has no such line: the appointment is the next step.

On the day itself the pause is over, and the deal turns up under Follow-ups with the sentence beside it — because „we will talk in two months“ is a promise, and a promise with a date on it belongs on the list of what is due. Picked up ends it; the note stays, because what they said keeps its worth. Nothing is stored for this beyond the date on the deal: no task is created that somebody has to tidy up later.

This is not the same as Hide from this list on a worksheet. That one takes a row out of that sheet and says so; it is not a date the customer gave, and the address list knows nothing about it. The pause belongs to the deal, and both sides read it there.

Dormant and „Follow up“ now answer with the same number. Until 20.09. the address list called a company dormant after four weeks of silence while the worksheet picked up a deal after two — the same question, two answers, and nobody would have noticed until the two lists were held side by side. The number lives in one place now, and it is a fortnight. An appointment still ahead silences both: somebody is on it. An appointment that should have happened three weeks ago and was never logged silences neither — that is exactly the case worth warning about.

Set apart on the right, behind a thin line, stand two that do not add up like that. Dormant (red edge) is a running deal nobody has spoken to in a fortnight — such an address is also in progress. Also in FiiPilot (turquoise) is a company that is a client over there, whatever stage it stands at. They are ticks, not stages: they combine with a stage and with each other, and they narrow the list rather than replace it. The count line says which of them is working, so a short list never looks like a lost one.

The two buttons at the end of the list line write out whatever the list is showing at that moment — same stage, same ticks, same sort, same search — as a PDF or an Excel file. The file says so in its own heading, so a printout can never be mistaken for the whole list.

Do I have to save?

No. Addresses and opportunities write themselves a moment after you stop typing; the line under the button says Unsaved… / Saving… / Saved ✓. Done writes out anything pending and closes the view.

Somebody else is editing this record

Whoever opens an address or a deal first holds it for twenty minutes. Everyone else can read it, and the lock is released the moment they leave, sign out, or are signed out for standing still.