General

Workflows, Clients, and Quotes: How the CRM Fits Together

A workflow is the backbone of the CRM. It's where your deals live, how your team divides up work, and how a casual lead becomes a tracked project. But workflows don't stand alone — they connect to your quotes, your team's roles, and your customers' portal accounts in ways that are powerful once you see the whole picture. This article walks through that picture, and clears up the one part that trips people up: how clients, quotes, and workflows actually relate.

Workflows and stages: your pipeline

A workflow is a pipeline — a series of stages a deal moves through from first contact to finished job. Think of stages as the columns on a board: New Lead → Site Visit → Proposal Sent → Won → Installing → Complete.

You can run as many workflows as you need, each with its own stages and colours:

A Residential pipeline and a Commercial pipeline with different steps.
A separate Service & Maintenance pipeline for existing customers.

Each workflow is its own world — its own stages, its own team, its own automations.

Quotes live in stages, not workflows

Here's the first thing worth saying plainly: a quote doesn't belong to a workflow directly. A quote sits in a stage, and that stage belongs to a workflow. Moving a deal forward means moving its quote from one stage to the next; the workflow is simply wherever those stages live.

This is why dragging a quote between columns on the board is all it takes to advance it — you're moving it from stage to stage, and its history is recorded each time (see the Stage History tab on any quote).

A quote also carries a project status — Quote, Won, In Progress, Completed, Lost, On Hold, Cancelled — which tracks the deal's outcome independently of which stage it's parked in. Stage is where it is in your process; project status is how the deal turned out.

Ways to view a workflow

The same workflow can be viewed however suits the moment:

View	Best for
Kanban	Dragging deals between stages on a board.
List	A filterable, sortable rundown of every quote.
Spreadsheet	Editing many quotes quickly, grid-style.
Calendar	Seeing events and tasks by date.
Map	Spotting deals geographically.
Collaboration	Team chat and shared documents for the workflow.

Who sees what: team roles

Workflows are also how access is divided. Each person's role decides which workflows — and which quotes — they can touch:

Role	Access
Admin / Team	Every workflow in the company. Can create, edit, and delete.
Agent	Only the workflows they're assigned to, and the quotes within them.
Installer	Only assigned workflows, view-only, with pricing hidden.
Client	Only their own quotes, through their portal.

Assigning an agent or installer to a workflow is what grants them visibility — they simply won't see workflows they're not on. This keeps a large team focused: a sales agent sees their pipeline, an installer sees the jobs they're building, and neither wades through the rest.

The client: the umbrella above your quotes

Now the part that's worth slowing down for.

A quote has its own name, email, and address — enough to stand entirely on its own. So why is there also a separate client record holding the same fields? Because a customer is often bigger than a single quote.

Picture this:

You quote a homeowner for solar on their house. Deal done — one quote, one address. A month later they call back: they want to proceed, and they'd like a separate quote for their business across town.

Now you have two quotes — different addresses, possibly different workflows (the home deal in Residential, the business deal in Commercial) — but one person behind them. That person is the client: a single umbrella record that owns both quotes.

That's the architecture in a sentence:

A client can have many quotes (projects), across many workflows, at the same time.
Clients connect to workflows only through their quotes — a client is never "on" a workflow directly.

This is also why name, email, and address live on both the quote and the client. Each quote can carry details specific to that job (the business quote has the business address), while the client record holds the person tying them all together. The client is the optional top-level record that makes "this is all the same customer" possible.

Empty clients vs. invited clients: the portal

Creating a client record is optional, and it comes in two flavours:

An empty client record. A quiet umbrella — it groups a customer's quotes and holds their contact details, but the customer themselves isn't logged into anything. Perfectly fine if you just want internal organization.
An invited client. Send them an invitation and the client becomes a real portal account. Now they can log in (including via a one-click magic link), see their proposals, sign, message you, and follow their project's progress. Invited clients can also get a referral link to send new business your way.

Either way, the quotes stay attached to the same client record — inviting them later doesn't change the structure, it just turns the lights on in their portal.

Keeping the team in the loop: watching clients

Because a client can span several quotes and workflows, team members can watch a client to stay informed across all of them. A watcher chooses what they care about — new quotes, status changes, messages, tasks — and gets notified when those happen, no matter which workflow the activity is in.

Events and the calendar

Events are the appointments that hang off your work — site visits, install dates, consultations. An event can be tied to a specific quote, and it shows up on the workflow's Calendar view alongside tasks, with reminders so nothing is missed.

How it all fits together

Put simply:

Workflows hold stages.
Quotes sit in stages and move through them; each quote is a project with its own outcome.
Clients are the optional umbrella that can own many quotes across many workflows.
Roles decide which workflows — and therefore which quotes — each teammate sees.
The portal turns a client record into a logged-in customer experience, when you want it.
Events, tasks, and watchers keep the people involved coordinated across the whole thing.

Quick reference

One customer, several jobs? Create a client and attach each quote to it — they can live in different workflows.
Need a salesperson focused? Assign them as an agent to just their workflow.
Bringing on a sub-installer? Add them as an installer on the relevant workflow — they'll see the jobs but not the pricing.
Want the customer involved? Invite the client to their portal; leave them as an empty record if you don't.
Tracking a deal's progress? Move its quote between stages; the outcome rides on its project status.

The workflow is the hub, but the client is the umbrella — once those two ideas click, everything else in the CRM falls into place.