CRM

Ballie's CRM module covers the full relationship lifecycle: capturing a lead, working it through a sales pipeline, converting it into a customer, tracking every activity along the way, and collecting what customers owe with payment reminders and payment reports. Vendor records live alongside customers for the procurement and expense side of the relationship.

On This Page

• A Note on Naming
• The CRM Dashboard
• Features
• How the Pieces Fit Together
• Quick Start
• Related Pages

A Note on Naming

Ballie adapts its wording to your business type, which you set in Company Settings. A service business sees Clients, Revenue, and Proposals; a trading business sees Customers, Sales, and Quotations — the same features either way.

These docs use the default trading wording (Customer, Quotation). If your sidebar says Clients, that's the same page this documentation calls Customers. Several screenshots on these pages come from a service-configured account, so they show "Client" where the text says "Customer".

The CRM Dashboard

Open CRM → Overview to land on the CRM dashboard.

The dashboard gives you:

• Quick action buttons across the top — Add Client, View Vendors, Create Invoice, View Clients, and a More Actions menu.
• Stat cards for total customers and total vendors, each showing how many are active.
• Recent Clients — the five most recently added customers, with their email and status. Click any row to open that customer.
• Recent Activities — a merged feed of the latest invoices, payments, and posted vouchers across the system. Each entry links straight to the underlying document.

TIP

The Recent Activities feed here is a system-wide audit trail of accounting documents. It is not the same thing as CRM Activities, which are the calls, meetings, and follow-up tasks your team logs against customers.

Features

Area	What it does
Leads	Capture prospects before they're paying customers. Track source, rating, and status, and convert a qualified lead straight into a customer.
Pipeline	A drag-and-drop kanban board of deals moving through Qualification, Proposal, Negotiation, Won, and Lost.
Customers	Full customer management — manual entry, bulk import, opening balances, duplicate detection, and per-customer invoices, payments, ledger, and aging.
Customer Statements	Balances across every customer account, and a full statement of account per customer, with PDF and Excel export.
Vendors	Supplier records for procurement, expenses, and vendor payments, with the same import, statement, and bulk-action tools as customers.
Activities	A sticky-note task board for calls, emails, meetings, notes, tasks, and follow-ups — draggable, colour-coded, with inline status changes.
Quotes & Proposals	Quotations live under Accounting but appear in the CRM menu, since they're part of the same sales conversation.
Record Payment	One quick-entry screen for money in from a customer or money out to a vendor.
Payment Reminders	Email customers with outstanding balances, with a cooldown so nobody gets reminded twice in the same week.
Payment Reports	Every payment movement — received and paid — with offsetting-account breakdown and CSV export.
CRM Reports	Receivables and payables position, pipeline health, lead funnel, follow-up workload, and top customers.

How the Pieces Fit Together

A typical relationship moves through the module like this:

1. A prospect arrives as a Lead — from your website, a referral, a walk-in, or a campaign.
2. While you work the lead, a Deal tracks it through the pipeline stages and Activities track the calls and follow-ups.
3. When the lead is ready to buy, Convert to Customer creates the customer record and its ledger account, and carries any open deal across.
4. You send a Quotation, convert it to an invoice, and the balance appears in Customer Statements.
5. As money moves, Record Payment logs it, Payment Reminders chases what's late, and Payment Reports shows what actually landed.

TIP

None of this is mandatory in order. You can add a customer directly without ever creating a lead, or record a payment without a quotation. The lead and pipeline stages exist for businesses that want to track the sales process explicitly.

Quick Start

New to the module? Work through it in this order:

1. Load your contacts. Add customers one at a time, or bulk import them from a spreadsheet. Do the same for vendors.
2. Set opening balances for anyone who already owed you money before you started using Ballie, so your aging is right from day one.
3. Start logging follow-ups in Activities so nothing slips.
4. Chase what's owed with Payment Reminders, and record what comes in with Record Payment.
5. Review the position in CRM Reports and Payment Reports.

Only add Leads and the Pipeline once the basics are running — they're most useful when several people are working deals at once.

Related Pages

• Invoices — Bill your customers
• Purchase Orders — Order from vendors
• Company Settings — Set your business type, which controls CRM wording
• Sales Reports — Deeper sales analytics