Moving a lead through the pipeline

A status is how your team says, in one word, what is happening with an enquiry. Solar Desk ships eight of them and takes no view on how you use them, beyond knowing which two mean the job is over and which one means money in the bank. The full table is in the status reference.

Changing one

There are two places to do it, and they do exactly the same thing.

1. On the quote list, use the dropdown in the Status column of the row. The change saves as soon as you pick it. There is no Save button and no confirmation, because a confirmation on something you will do forty times a day is a tax rather than a safeguard.

2. On the lead itself, use the picker at the top right of the header, beside the customer’s name.

If the save is refused, the control puts itself back to where it was and shows the reason underneath. The two you are most likely to see are “Your session has expired. Sign in again.” and “That lead is no longer available.”. Neither leaves the lead in a half-changed state.

Picking the status a lead is already in does nothing at all, and does not add a line to its history.

Every member of your team can change a status. This is not an admin-only action, because a rep who cannot record what happened on their own call will simply not record it.

There is no order to follow

Any status can move to any other. Nothing has to pass through Contacted on the way to Bought, and nothing stops you moving a lead back from Lost to Interested when they ring you in March about the quote you sent in November.

This is deliberate. Enforced pipelines are built on the assumption that sales happen in a fixed sequence, and solar sales do not: a customer who went cold comes back, a survey uncovers something that sends a confirmed job back to Reviewing, and somebody clicks the wrong row. A pipeline that argues gets worked around, usually by not being updated at all.

The one thing you cannot do is set a status that does not exist on your account.

Changes are recorded, not overwritten

Each move writes an entry to the lead’s History: what it moved from, what it moved to, the date and who did it. The lead carries one current status and a complete record of how it got there.

That means a mistaken change is not destructive. Put it back, and the history shows both moves rather than pretending neither happened. It also means the history answers questions the current status cannot: how long something sat in Contacted before anyone rang, or whether a lost lead was ever actually contacted.

A brand new enquiry has an empty history. What is recorded is changes, and arriving is not one, so the first line appears the first time somebody moves the lead off New.

Two moves happen without you

Almost every status change is somebody choosing one. Two are automatic, and they are deliberately different from each other.

A customer accepting a quote in their account moves the lead to Accepted. They clicked “yes” on a quotation you sent them, from their own account, having confirmed a form of words that says explicitly it is not a contract.

Someone at your company recording a sale moves the lead to Bought. That is an admin pressing Accepted on a sent quote in the dashboard.

The distance between those two is the point. A customer clicking a button has had no survey, no deposit and no contract. Treating that as a won job would put money into your confirmed total that nobody has agreed to spend, and would tell you that a deal is done when what has actually happened is that a homeowner is keen. So Accepted counts towards pipeline value, and Bought counts towards confirmed value, and only a person at your company can move a lead into the second one.

Both automatic moves are written to History like any other, without a name against them where nobody at your company made the change. When a quote is accepted covers the two routes in full.

If you have renamed a status

Automatic moves find their target by what a status is, not by what it is called, so renaming Bought to “Won” or “Installed” keeps everything working. Deleting the status is the case that does not work: with nowhere to move the lead to, the app records an internal note explaining that the status was left alone rather than guessing at a replacement.

What a status changes elsewhere

Beyond the label on the row, a status affects three things:

• The metrics at the top of the quote list. Open statuses feed pipeline value, Bought feeds confirmed value, Lost feeds neither.
• The status filter and the Excel export. Both work off the current status, not the history.
• What the customer sees, if they have an account. The status label is shown beside each job in the homeowner portal. Not the colour, not the history, not your notes, but the word itself. Rename with that in mind: “Asked to call later” reads fine to a homeowner, and a label like “Time waster” does not.