Answers
Pipelines: the deal board Keap does not give you
Flip on the Pipelines module and your CRM deals become an actual board, with four views on the sidebar. Overview is the sales strip (total pipeline, won in the window, win rate, average deal size, going stale, each against the period before), a breakdown by one of your own deal fields (open, won and lost for each of its values, the money in each, the win rate and how they arrived; pick the field at the top of the card), a bar per stage (with more than one pipeline, each pipeline's stages sit under its own name, and the selector on that card shows one pipeline or all), the value trend and the movement between stages. Pipelines is the board itself: a column per stage, the cards you drag between them, and each record a click away. Deals (Opportunities on Keap's legacy board) is the sortable table with every custom field as a column, and the download icon at the top exports exactly the rows it shows: every filter, the search box and, on the Opportunities board, the Due row. Analytics is the sales manager half.
Drag a deal to a stage
On a desktop, drag a card into another column and the stage is written to your CRM the moment you let go, through the same path the deal drawer uses, with a note on the deal saying we did it. If the CRM refuses, the card goes back and the reason is said. On a phone a stage is a tab and a move is a Move to button, never a drag: a drag that competes with a scrolling thumb moves deals by accident. Any touch screen gets the same buttons on every card, an iPad or an unfolded phone included, with every column on screen as on a desktop.
A deal’s own page
Click a card and the deal opens as a page over the board, with its contact beside it. On one side the deal: the stage as a stepper you can click, won and lost, the value in dollars as your CRM holds it, the owner, days in this stage against the stage’s own stale rule, when it was created, the latest note and a box for a new one, and every move we observed. On the other the contact: their email and phone, where they came from, their notes, their other deals on the board, and what they have paid, each payment linked to its order in Keap. Close it and you are back at the same spot on the board.
Who sees which deals
By default everyone with the Pipelines area sees the whole board. On Settings, Users an admin can scope a person to only the deals they own in the CRM: we match them to a CRM user by the email the CRM reports, or by the user you pick, and from then on the board, the list, the export and every move are theirs and nobody else’s. The owner is matched the same way, on their own row on Settings, Users: the owner always sees everyone’s, and the match is what their Mine view reads. A manager the CRM can match gets an Everyone / Mine switch at the top of the page.
It stays fresh by itself
The board refreshes every 15 minutes, and the page updates itself without you touching F5. When a rep drags a deal through three stages before lunch, we record every hop with a timestamp. Keap keeps no stage history at all, we checked, thoroughly, so we built the memory it should have had.
Still on Keap’s old Opportunities?
Plenty of long-standing Keap accounts have deals on the legacy Opportunities board rather than on Pipelines, and some have records on both. This page shows one Keap board at a time: choose which under Board settings, and a line above the board says when records sit on the one you are not using. On that board you change the stage, the next action, free-text custom fields and a note: drag a record within its board, or move it to another board from its page, and everything else is worked in Keap. On that board the STAGE is the outcome: a record in one of the ending stages you set under Opportunity Defaults counts as closed, won in your Win stage and lost in your Loss stage, the two Opportunity Defaults names, and any other ending is read by its name; days in stage comes from Keap's own stage-to-stage history. A record's value is the products on it, as Keap's own header shows it, or the projected low and high it holds as a span when it has no products, and any total adds up the low end. That board refreshes with each data refresh rather than every 15 minutes, and Sync now reads it on demand. Its Analytics read Keap’s own dates, when each record was created and when it entered its stage, so Movement, Stage velocity and Where deals go next, which are measured from our nightly photographs of the Deals board, are not drawn on it. Its value trend is its own: each data refresh photographs the board’s open value, one point a day, so the line and the Total pipeline comparison begin the day it is first photographed and grow from there. A short How this board works line under the board opens the rest. On either board, untick Show beside a stage under Board settings and its empty column leaves the board; the column is drawn again the moment a record sits in it, so nothing can go missing.
Find any deal
Every filter sits on one row at the top of the page: who you are looking at, the window, the pipeline, the owner, your own fields, and the filter box. The box takes a deal name, a contact name, an email, or a phone number in any format. Type what you know; it figures out what you meant, and every count on the page narrows with it.
Board settings
Every CRM account has different custom fields, so YOU pick which ones matter, what color each value wears, and how many days a deal may sit in each stage before it reads as stale, under Settings, Modules, Pipelines. Mark deals won or lost, move stages, and add notes from the drawer, or in bulk from the Deals view if it is that kind of day.
Which stages mean the deal is finished
A deal has two ways to be over and they disagree more often than you would think. There is its status, which your CRM calls active, won or lost, and there is the stage it sits in, which is a column somebody named. A stage called “Closed Won” is not the same fact as a status of won, and on a board that came in from an import the two part company constantly: deals get dragged into the closing column and nobody changes the status.
So on Settings, Modules, Pipelines each stage gets one answer: Open, Won or Lost. That answer decides what counts as open pipeline, what counts as won revenue, and what the morning brief tells you, everywhere and all at once.
We guess from the stage’s name and show you the guess, badged so you can see it was guessed. Nothing is stored until you save, and the guess is often wrong in exactly the way that matters: a stage called Won Back carries the word won and is live work. Correct it and it stays corrected.
Until you mark them, nothing changes: an account that has never opened the page reads exactly as it did before. Once you have, the board names any disagreement rather than quietly fixing it, in a line like “3 deals sit in a Won or Lost stage but are still marked active”. That sentence is your cleanup list. We do not silently adjust the number, because a number that corrects itself teaches nobody that their board needs tidying.
Sales boards and operational boards
Some pipelines are not sales at all: they track the work after the sale, such as delivery, installation or fulfilment, and their value belongs in no forecast and no revenue figure. Under Settings, Modules, Pipelines, Which boards are sales, and which are operational marks each board Sales or Operational. Every board starts as Sales, so nothing changes until you choose.
An operational board stays a board you work: its columns, cards, drag, list and export are exactly as they were. What changes is that nothing on it is counted: not the strip at the top of Pipelines, pipeline coverage, the stage bars, the By card, the value trend, Movement or Analytics, and not the daily brief, your dashboard’s pipeline tiles, Ask AI, AI Access or the sales reported back to your ad platforms. On HighLevel, a deal won on an operational board stops counting as revenue too. The Overview and Analytics name your operational boards and how many records sit on them, and the strip’s tiles open the list with Counted in reports picked, so every figure still ends at the rows behind it. Pick an operational board in the toolbar and you get its board to work, with no figures over it.
A deal is counted with the board it sits on now, so a deal won on a sales board and then moved onto an operational one leaves the sales figures with it. A move from a sales stage onto an operational board still counts in Movement and Analytics, since that is how a sold deal is handed over; a move from one operational stage to another does not. On a legacy Opportunity board divided into groups, each group can be marked, and Won and Lost, which every group shares, always counts: a closed record there is counted with the group it left, where Keap’s stage history says which. If a divider moves in Keap, a marked group is no longer the group you marked; Board settings says so and counts it again until you mark it once more.
The Analytics view: velocity, stalling, and where deals go
Typical days in each stage gives each stage the middle value of how many days deals actually sit there, measured from the moves we recorded; the figure is printed at the end of each bar. Deals going stale leaves out deals that have sat over a year (it counts them in one line, so a list of long-dead leads does not hide the deals slipping now), leaves out any stage you set to 0 days in Board settings, and leaves out a stage that reads like won or lost but is not marked, telling you which to mark. It flags open deals against that stage’s own normal rather than a made up threshold, and falls back to the stage’s configured limit only while it has too little history to have a normal. Stage-to-stage conversion (the first card on the Analytics view) counts, per stage, how many advanced, how many were sent back, and how many were lost right there, and turns that into an advance rate.
Every one of those abstains rather than guessing. A stage with fewer than three completed stays is named in one line under the bars instead of getting a figure, and a stage with fewer than five recorded exits shows its count instead of a rate. These numbers exist nowhere else, because Keap keeps no stage history for deals and this is measured from the board we photograph nightly, so they get better every week you run. On the legacy Opportunities board, Stage velocity and Where deals go next are not drawn, and Going stale uses each stage’s limit from Board settings.