Sales Pipeline

Sales Pipeline

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business, and while it’s fairly easy to predict cash outflows, it’s usually more difficult to predict what’s likely to arrive in the till and when. JobBag uses the Sales Pipeline and the Billings Forecast to minimise the guesswork and maximise forward planning around Cash Flow. The sooner you can detect future “potholes” in upcoming months, the sooner you can do something about filling those holes.

This is the tool by which we can identify potential revenue. We can look at jobs which still have a Proposed status, but harness the intuition of the Account Managers as to how likely the job is to get accepted by the client. In addition, Account Managers can record when they think this job will not only proceed or go live but also the likely conversion of the Kind Codes making up the job into Billings.

Quotes and Estimates go through 3 stages in JobBag

1. Unapproved, where the quote has been created by an Account Manager, but is awaiting sign-off by a Supervisor 2. Approved, where the quote has been signed off, and can be sent to the Client 3. Accepted, where the Client has given authorisation to proceed with the work.

At the unapproved stage, the Sales sits at 50% likely to proceed by default, and the estimated billing occurs in Month 1 by default. A particular month is not indicated at this point, as the quote has not been accepted by the client.

Clicking on the Pipeline Icon allows the user to set the likelihood of Acceptance by the Client, and the expected billing pattern:

If I am able to put in an expected Go live date, that will change the settings from Month 1, Month 2 etc. into a matching pattern, starting with the Go live date as Month 1:

If I have included options in the quote, I can set the figures with or without the options and rate them separately.

Multiple Quotes can now be accepted on the same Job

This is a major change in JobBag, and as such, a cautionary warning comes up when I go to the Sales Pipeline under JobBag / Sales Pipeline:

As a consequence, if multiple quotes have been forwarded to the client, and they select a particular quote, the others MUST be marked as declined, or duplication will occur in the Sales Pipeline:

Sales Pipeline Window

In the Sales Pipeline, we have a high degree of flexibility as to the data we want to view, based on:

We can also work on the Go live dates through the Sales Pipeline window, rather than each individual job:

As well as displaying the last recorded Diary note:

We can now print, with a variety of layout options:

A realistic summary of when we believe the sales and billings will occur: