One transaction per deal

Here is the biggest shift in thinking in the whole CRM, and the one that saves the most confusion: the lead is the CLIENT, not the deal. A person buys a house from you this year, sells theirs the next, and refinances in three. That is one client and three deals.

So each deal lives in its own transaction, with its own document folder and its own emails. As the screen itself puts it: "A client persists over time; each purchase, sale or refinance lives in its own transaction."

The first one opens itself

You do not have to create it. When the lead is created, the platform opens its first transaction, and the kind comes from the lead type: a buyer opens a Purchase, a seller opens a Sale, a rental opens a Rental. A double-closing lead opens a Purchase, because that deal always starts there.

If for some reason it did not open, the lead is created anyway and the deal is opened by hand from the tab. No lead creation is ever lost over this.

How to read a transaction

• The code: year, client and deal number within that client. It is the one you say on the phone.
• The status, one of six: Open, In progress, On hold, Closed, Fell through or Archived. The first three count as active.
• The shortcuts to "See folder" and "See emails," which open the Vault and the correspondence filtered to that deal.
• "Open file," which takes you to the transaction file, where the next five lessons happen.

The pipeline stage and the status are NOT the same

This is the most common mix-up. The stage (New, Contacted, Under Contract, Closing) describes where the CLIENT sits in your sales process. The status describes how THAT deal is going. A client can be in Closing with one transaction closed and another just opened.

And there is a practical consequence worth knowing before it surprises you: reporting the closing on the board does not close the transaction. They are two separate acts, in two separate places.

The closing profile

When you open a new transaction, the platform asks five questions: the side you represent, the funding type, the property type, the contract form and the county. Five answers, and from them come the to-do list, the Florida clocks and the county calculator.

The contract form matters more than it looks, because it decides which deadlines run: FR/BAR AS IS, FR/BAR standard, CRSP or another. You can answer now or later, and there is a checkbox to create the to-do list for that closing right away.