Contacts and deals: customer card, funnels, stages
Contacts hold customer data and all correspondence with them, while deals track sales through stages on a Kanban board. Here's how the contacts list works, how to set up sales funnels with their own stages, and what happens to a deal when its card moves to a new stage.
Contacts
The Contacts section is the company's full customer list, with columns for the creation date and tags. Tags help group contacts by your own criteria (say, "VIP" or "Wholesale") — add or remove them right from the list or from a contact's card. The "Import" and "Export" buttons load contacts from a file or export the current list.
An individual contact's card (name, phone numbers, email, linked channels) opens from a conversation in the Chat section — that's also where duplicates get merged, if the same customer ended up on two cards by accident: see Duplicate contacts: why they happen and how to merge them.
Funnels and stages
A new company already has one default funnel ("General funnel") with four stages: New, In progress, Success deal, Failed deal. In Settings → Funnels, additional funnels can be created for different sales processes (a separate funnel for wholesale customers, say), each with its own set of stages.
Each stage has a type — New, In progress, Success, or Failed — which sets its behavior on the board, its order among the other stages, and the color of its cards. A stage can also carry an optional WIP limit (the maximum number of deals in progress on it at once — exceeding it shows a warning in AISAR) and a number of days after which a deal sitting on that stage counts as stale.
Deals
The Deals section shows a Kanban board for the selected funnel — cards are grouped into stage columns and dragged between them. A deal carries an amount and currency, a responsible employee, an expected close date, a probability, and a source — where it came from (manually, from a WhatsApp/Telegram/Instagram conversation, from Bitrix24, or via the API). Moving a deal to a losing stage prompts AISAR to ask for a loss reason.
Opening a deal card shows three tabs — Overview (the main fields), Tasks, and Timeline (a history of changes) — plus the deal contact's conversation right there, without switching to the Chat section.
A new deal can be created either from the Deals section itself or right from a contact's card in a conversation — in the latter case, it's tied to that contact immediately.
Common issues
| Symptom | Cause and what to do |
|---|---|
| The deal doesn't mark as won after dragging it | Check the type of the stage it landed on — the status only changes when it hits a stage of type Success or Failed, not just whichever column happens to be last on the board. |
| A WIP-limit warning keeps popping up | More deals have piled up on this stage at once than the configured limit — it's not a hard block, just a signal to clear the stage or raise the limit in the funnel settings. |
| Imported contacts came in as duplicates of existing ones | Import doesn't always match a row to an existing contact — merge the duplicates by hand, see Duplicate contacts. |
See also
Searching a contact's correspondence — in Searching all company messages. Syncing contacts and deals with Bitrix24 — in Connecting Bitrix24. Contact segments for broadcasts — in Broadcasts: how to prepare and send one without getting banned.