The CRM module is where a relationship becomes revenue. It captures leads, qualifies them into opportunities against the accounts and contacts you sell to, builds priced quotes, sends proposals and contracts for signature, and — when a quote is accepted — converts it directly into an Accounting invoice so nothing is re-keyed. Marketing campaigns, a one-to-one Communicate panel, sales targets and forecasting sit alongside, giving each seller a single connected view of their pipeline.
This guide is a reference for what the module does and how the pieces fit together. It describes IXL CORE version 1.0.
Overview
At a glance, CRM covers these connected areas:
- Leads — early enquiries you capture, qualify and convert.
- Accounts & contacts — the organisations you sell to and the people within them.
- Opportunities — qualified deals moving through a stage pipeline.
- Quotes — priced, line-item proposals that can convert into an Accounting invoice.
- Proposals & contracts — sectioned documents you send, with optional AI drafting and e-signature.
- Campaigns — marketing efforts that leads and contacts can be attributed to.
- Communicate — one-to-one email or SMS sent straight from a lead or contact.
- Reporting & forecasting — a dashboard, summary reports, sales targets and a pipeline forecast.
Every record is scoped to a level in your organisation hierarchy (organisation, entity, branch, department or position), and every action is governed by permissions (see Access & permissions).
Leads
A lead is an unqualified enquiry. You can capture a first and last name, company name, email, phone, a job title, a source and the campaign it came from, and optionally link it to an existing account or contact. A lead needs at least a first name or a company name to be saved. Each lead carries an owner, and its status moves through new → contacted → qualified, or is set aside as lost or junk. Status is a controlled transition on its own endpoint, not a free-text field.
When a lead is ready, you convert it in one step: the conversion creates (or reuses) an account and contact, opens a named opportunity, and starts a quote — you supply the opportunity name and quote title, and optionally an amount and currency. The lead is then marked converted.
Typical steps
- Go to CRM → Leads and create a lead, capturing name/company, contact details and source.
- Work the lead, moving its status from new to contacted to qualified.
- Click Convert — name the opportunity and quote — to spin up the account, contact, opportunity and quote together.
Accounts & contacts
An account is an organisation you sell to. It holds a name and legal name, an account type (drawn from your organisation’s configurable option list), status (active, inactive or archived), email, phone, website, industry, registration and tax numbers, and a full address. An owner is recorded for each account.
Each account has any number of contacts — the people you deal with. A contact captures name, email, phone and mobile, job title, a role (from your configurable role list), and status. Communication preferences are first-class: email opt-in, SMS opt-in, a preferred contact method (email, phone or SMS), whether the contact is the primary, and the date they were last contacted. These consent flags govern the Communicate panel described below.
Typical steps
- Go to CRM → Accounts and create the account with its billing and tax details.
- Open the account and add contacts, marking one as primary and setting their contact preferences.
Opportunities
An opportunity is a qualified deal. It links to its account and contact (and the originating lead), and carries a name, description, amount, currency, a probability (0–100%) and an expected close date. It moves through a stage pipeline — new → qualified → quote ready → negotiation → won / lost — again via a dedicated stage endpoint rather than direct editing. Two shortcut actions, mark won and mark lost (with a lost reason), close a deal and set its outcome. Won and lost figures feed the reporting and forecast.
Quotes
A quote is a priced proposal built from line items. Each line has a description, quantity, unit, unit price and a tax rate (0–100%), and the module computes line totals, an optional document-level discount (percentage or fixed), tax and the quote total. A quote carries a title, an optional quote number, validity date, reference, terms and separate customer-facing and internal notes, plus billing and shipping addresses. It can be linked to its lead, opportunity, account and contact.
Status runs draft → sent → accepted / declined / expired / revised. Sending a quote generates a branded PDF, marks the quote sent, and — where the contact has an email address — dispatches it through the platform Communication Hub with the PDF attached; you can optionally also nudge the contact by SMS when they have a mobile number. Sends can be scheduled for a future time. When a quote is accepted, convert to invoice creates a draft Accounting AR invoice in the same entity: it maps each line (allocating any document discount pro-rata so per-line tax matches), sets the customer from the CRM account, applies the customer’s payment terms for the due date, and links the invoice back to the quote. This is guarded so a quote can only be invoiced once.
Typical steps
- Go to CRM → Quotes, create the quote and add line items; totals, discount and tax calculate for you.
- Send the quote — a PDF is generated and emailed (and optionally an SMS nudge sent).
- Once accepted, Convert to invoice to raise the draft AR invoice in Accounting.
Proposals & contracts
A proposal is a sectioned document (title plus up to 30 titled sections with body text, and terms) addressed to an account or a lead, and optionally tied to an opportunity, quote or a document template. Proposals can be previewed, sent for the recipient to view online, and drafted with AI — a per-section AI draft is generated through the platform AI gateway (metered against your AI budget). Proposal status runs draft → sent → viewed → accepted / declined / expired / revised.
A contract is a counterparty agreement with a type (service, NDA, MSA, SLA, SoW or other), a value and currency, start and end dates, and auto-renewal settings (renewal term, notice days). Like proposals, it is built from titled sections and can be previewed, sent and AI-drafted. Contracts carry their own lifecycle — draft → sent → active → declined / expired / terminated / renewed — with explicit terminate and renew actions. Both proposals and contracts expose a public view for the recipient, supporting online acceptance and e-signature.
Campaigns
A campaign groups marketing activity by type (email, event, webinar, social, advertising, referral or other), with a status (planned, active, paused, completed, cancelled or archived), start and end dates, a budget and currency, and a description. Leads reference the campaign that produced them, so you can trace pipeline back to source. Campaigns can be archived when finished.
Communicate
The Communicate panel sends a one-to-one message from a lead or contact — choose email (with a subject) or SMS and author the body. The recipient address is never taken from the browser: it is resolved server-side from the record itself, and the subject is sanitised at the boundary to prevent injection. Sends respect the contact’s opt-in preferences, and SMS is the metered channel.
Reporting & forecasting
CRM includes a dashboard and a summary report, both scoped to the level and owner you choose and drawn from the same live records, so pipeline, won/lost and activity figures are consistent by construction. Sales targets can be set per period (month, quarter or year) and optionally per owner, and the forecast measures the pipeline against those targets. Settings let an administrator manage the configurable option lists (account types, contact roles and similar) that keep records consistent.
Access & permissions {#access-and-permissions}
Every CRM action maps to a specific capability — for example crm.leads.view, crm.quotes.send, crm.quotes.convert, crm.opportunities.mark_won, crm.contracts.terminate, crm.forecast.manage and crm.settings.manage are each separate permissions. Capabilities are grouped into roles and assigned to users, and they are enforced on every request, not merely hidden in the interface. Records also respect a data-scope level (organisation, entity, branch, department or position): you see and act on records within your scope, and cross-scope binding is blocked — for example, converting a lead cannot reuse an account outside the lead’s scope. Converting a quote to an invoice additionally requires the Accounting invoice-create permission and its commercial entitlement.
How CRM connects
CRM is not an island. On the shared platform foundation:
- Accounting receives an accepted quote as a draft AR invoice — the customer is created from the CRM account and the lines, discount and tax carry across automatically.
- The Communication Hub delivers quote emails, proposal and contract sends, and the Communicate panel’s email and SMS, subject to the tenant’s email/SMS configuration and credits.
- The AI gateway drafts proposal and contract sections, metered against your organisation’s AI budget.
- Document templates back branded proposals and contracts, and generated PDFs live in the shared document store.
That connection is the point: you capture a relationship once, work it through to a signed contract or a won quote, and the rest of the business stays in step.