Lifecycle

Every contact has one lifecycle stage that says how far along your relationship is, from a fresh lead to a paying customer. It’s a fixed set of stages, and most of it happens automatically — bookings, deals, and payments move contacts forward on their own.

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The stages

These show as a small dot badge on the contact list and the contact page. The list is fixed — you can’t rename or add stages, because the automation depends on these exact ones. (For a customizable, deal-by-deal view, that’s the pipeline.)

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How stages move

Forward automatically. Opportunity and Customer set themselves:

• Book an appointment or open a deal → the contact becomes an Opportunity.
• A completed job, a Won deal, or a paid invoice → they become a Customer.

You set Qualified and Lost by hand from the dropdown at the top of the contact page — those are judgment calls the system can’t make for you. A few things worth knowing:

• Stages only move forward on their own. A customer who books again stays a Customer; the system never demotes anyone automatically. You can always change it manually.
• You don’t have to hit every stage. Someone who books and pays right away jumps straight to Customer — Qualified is an optional waypoint, not a checkpoint.
• Lost isn’t permanent. If a Lost contact comes back — a new deal or booking — they’re pulled back into Opportunity automatically.

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Lifecycle vs. pipeline stage

Two different things, styled differently so you can tell them apart:

• Lifecycle lives on the contact — the fixed stages above, shown as a dot badge. One contact = one lifecycle stage. It answers “how far along is this relationship?”
• Pipeline stages live on deals — shown as filled colored badges, fully customizable in Pipeline → Customize stages. A contact can have several deals, each in its own stage. They answer “where is this specific opportunity?”

So a repeat customer might be lifecycle Customer, with three closed deals and one active deal sitting in your Quoted stage. That’s the intended model for businesses where customers come back for more work. If you don’t use deals at all, the lifecycle stage alone is enough.

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