Sales opportunities in SAP Business One: the Opportunity window, stages and closing percentages, linked quotations, and the pipeline reports

Where opportunities live in B1.

In SAP Business One 10.0 the module is called Opportunities and the window is Opportunity (Opportunities → Opportunity). One window handles sales and purchasing opportunities; the Opportunity Type decides which. A sales opportunity belongs to a customer or a lead, a purchasing opportunity to a vendor. B1 numbers each opportunity, gives it the status Open, and keeps it open until you mark it Won or Lost.

In the header you choose the business partner, and B1 fills in the default contact person and sales employee from the business partner master data. The Owner is the employee responsible; it can differ per stage, and with data ownership authorisations you can limit who sees whose opportunities. The header also shows the Closing % of the last stage and links to the related activities and documents. How opportunities fit next to leads, activities and quotations in the wider sales picture is in the guide on CRM in SAP Business One.

The tabs, one by one.

• Potential. Predicted Closing In (days, weeks or months) and the Predicted Closing Date; the Potential Amount, which is mandatory; the Weighted Amount, which B1 calculates as the potential amount times the closing percentage of the last stage; Gross Profit %; and the Level of Interest and interest ranges, from lists you define yourself.
• General. The BP channel (a partner through whom the deal comes), the BP project, remarks, the Information Source (an exhibition, an advert, a referral) and the Industry.
• Stages. One row per stage the opportunity passes, with dates, sales employee, percentage, amount, a linked document and activities. More on this below.
• Partners. Business partners who work on the deal with you, with their relationship to your company.
• Competitors. Who else is in the race, their threat level and, if you lose, which one won.
• Summary. Won or Lost, the closing document and the reasons. Attachments holds offers, drawings and minutes.

Setting up stages and lists.

Before the first opportunity, define the stages in Administration → Setup → Opportunities → Opportunity Stages. Each stage gets a name, a stage number for the order, and a Closing Percentage that B1 uses to weight the forecast. A stage you no longer want gets the Cancelled box and is no longer offered. The same Setup folder holds Partners, Competitors (with a threat level of low, medium or high) and Relationships. Information sources, levels of interest, interest ranges and the won or lost reasons are defined from the dropdown itself, with Define New.

• Five to seven stages, each with an exit everyone recognises: "quotation sent", not "interested".
• Percentages agreed with the sales manager, and checked once a year against what was really won; Stage Analysis shows how far opportunities got.
• Few, short reasons (up to 30 characters each), defined before go-live, so the Lost Opportunities report means something.
• One central list of competitors, kept by one person; otherwise the same rival turns up in five spellings.

How stages, activities and quotations fit together.

The Stages tab is the history of the opportunity. Every move to a next stage is a new row, with a start date no earlier than the closing date of the previous row; B1 copies the data of the previous row into it. You can choose any stage, in any order. The percentage comes from the stage setup and can be changed per row, and the percentage of the last row drives the weighted amount.

On each row you can link a document: a Document Type (for a sales opportunity a sales quotation, sales order, delivery or A/R invoice) and the Doc. No. When you pick a new document, B1 offers to take its amount and gross profit, excluding tax, into the opportunity. That is how a quotation belongs to an opportunity: through the stage row, not through a field on the quotation. Show BPs Docs limits the list to the customer's own documents. The Activities button on a row creates an activity for that stage, and that activity shows the opportunity as its source on its Linked Document tab.

To close, open the Summary tab and choose Won or Lost. B1 proposes the document of the last stage (for Won you can choose another one), you add the reasons, and B1 asks whether to close the related activities. After Update the fields are locked; to change anything, set the status back to Open. An opportunity can only be removed (Data → Remove) while it is open, and removing cannot be undone.

The reports.

All opportunity reports are under Opportunities → Opportunities Reports, and also in the Reports module.

• Opportunities Pipeline: open opportunities per stage, with number, expected total and weighted amount, as a table and a graph; filter on sales employee, stage, dates, documents and closing percentage. Dynamic Opportunity Analysis shows the same pipeline as balloons, sized by amount, that move per stage.
• Opportunities Forecast and Opportunities Forecast Over Time: the expected amounts by predicted closing date, per period.
• Stage Analysis: how many opportunities reached each stage and how long they stayed there.
• Won Opportunities and Lost Opportunities, by date, sales employee and business partner; Opportunity Statistics for counts of open, won and lost; Information Source Distribution Over Time for where opportunities come from.
• My Open Opportunities and My Closed Opportunities: per sales employee, without selection criteria. They only work when the user is linked to their sales employee, in Employee Master Data or in User Defaults.

The reports are only as good as the data in them. A pipeline with predicted closing dates in the past and amounts nobody updated still adds up nicely.

What sales people miss.

• On the road. The Opportunity window is built for a desk. The Web Client has opportunities too and runs in a browser, and since FP 2602 it lets you add attachments with a phone camera; try it with your sales people before you look further.
• Follow-up. Nothing tells a sales person that an opportunity has been quiet for three weeks or that its predicted closing date has passed. An alert on a saved query can, if someone builds and maintains it; see SQL queries in SAP Business One.
• Stage changes. Moving on is a new row on a tab, with dates. In practice people skip it, and the percentage stays where it was.
• Forecast discipline. A quotation linked to the stage row keeps the amount right; a quotation made on its own does not, and the forecast drifts away from what is really on offer.
• Won and lost without reasons. If the reason is optional in practice, Lost Opportunities shows numbers but no lessons.

Checklist: before you use opportunities.

• Sales employees set up (Administration → Setup → General → Sales Employees/Buyers), and every sales user linked to their sales employee.
• Five to seven stages with a clear exit and an agreed closing percentage.
• Reasons, competitors and information sources defined, each by one owner.
• A rule: every quotation for an opportunity is linked to its stage row.
• A rule: predicted closing date and potential amount are updated at every stage change.
• Data ownership decided: who sees and changes whose opportunities.
• The Opportunities Pipeline and Stage Analysis in the weekly sales meeting, straight from B1 instead of a spreadsheet.

How KoonCRM approaches it.

KoonCRM, our light CRM for sales people on SAP Business One, works on the opportunities and stages already in B1, through the Service Layer, without a database of customers or opportunities of its own. The pipeline board has one column per B1 stage with number and amount; dragging a card adds the stage row in B1, and Won or Lost with a reason closes the opportunity there. A quotation made from an opportunity is linked to its stage row, as B1 does it, and an order is copied from it in one click. My day shows the follow-ups, and two follow-up rules create tasks in B1 for an opportunity quiet for a set number of days or a quotation open too long. The forecast shows the weighted pipeline per sales person, per stage and per expected closing month, and won and lost per reason. It works on the phone too, as an app installed from the browser.

KoonCRM does not edit the information source, industry, level of interest, competitors or partners of an opportunity; those stay in the B1 client. It is in development: all functions are built and tested against a simulated B1, and the next step is the test on a real SAP Business One and a pilot with a first sales team. There is no price and no date yet; the KoonCRM page says exactly where it stands.

Sources: SAP Business One 10.0 help documentation (Opportunity window and its tabs, Adding Opportunities, Defining Stages, Partners - Setup, Competitors - Setup, Closing and Deleting Opportunities, Opportunity Reports, Opportunities Pipeline, Dynamic Opportunity Analysis, Stage Analysis, My Open Opportunities, Activity: Linked Document tab); the SAP Business One 10.0 database reference (OOPR, OPR1, OOST); What's New in SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2602 (Web Client). SAP and SAP Business One are trademarks of SAP SE.