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The working sheet. One row per open opportunity, nothing closed.
| Deal | Company | Stage | Value | Close | Prob | Weighted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ashgrove Dental — fit-out | Ashgrove Dental | Proposal sent | £12,400 | 12 Sep | 60% | £7,440 |
| Kanaka — line 2 upgrade | Kanaka Foods | Negotiation | £38,000 | 30 Sep | 80% | £30,400 |
| Bexley — annual retainer | Bexley Group | Discovery | £24,000 | 14 Oct | 25% | £6,000 |
| Halstead — depot rollout | Halstead & Co | Qualified | £56,500 | 02 Nov | 40% | £22,600 |
| Perrin — brand refresh | Perrin Studio | Proposal sent | £9,800 | 19 Sep | 60% | £5,880 |
| Marrow — route audit | Marrow Logistics | Stalled | £18,000 | — | 10% | £1,800 |
Weighted value is a formula · do not type over column G
Edit this once, on day one. Everything else reads from it.
| Stage | Exit criteria — what must be true to leave | Typical days | Prob |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiry | Named contact, stated need, not a mailing-list signup. | 2 | 5% |
| Qualified | Budget acknowledged and a decision-maker identified. | 9 | 25% |
| Discovery | Requirements written down and agreed back to them. | 14 | 40% |
| Proposal sent | Priced document delivered, with a date to respond by. | 11 | 60% |
| Negotiation | Terms under discussion, not price fishing. | 8 | 80% |
| Stalled | No movement in thirty days. Not lost — parked, with a reason. | — | 10% |
Exit criteria are the point of this sheet · a stage without one is a feeling
Formulas only. It reads the Deals sheet and the target you type in row 2.
| Month | Committed | Weighted | Best case | vs target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2026 | £30,400 | £43,720 | £60,200 | −£4,600 |
| Oct 2026 | £0 | £6,000 | £24,000 | −£29,000 |
| Nov 2026 | £0 | £22,600 | £56,500 | −£12,400 |
| Q4 total | £0 | £28,600 | £80,500 | −41% |
| Rolling 90 | £30,400 | £72,320 | £140,700 | −19% |
Committed = 80%+ only · best case is not a forecast, it is a ceiling
Optional, and the first sheet people abandon. Keep it or delete it.
| Date | Deal | What happened | Next step | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 04 Sep | Kanaka — line 2 | Site visit, three objections raised | Revised quote by Tue | PN |
| 03 Sep | Ashgrove Dental | Proposal opened twice, no reply | Call Thursday am | DR |
| 02 Sep | Halstead — depot | Asked for phased pricing | Build option B | DR |
| 29 Aug | Marrow — route audit | Sponsor left the company | Park until Nov | PN |
| 28 Aug | Bexley Group | Discovery workshop booked | 11 Sep, 10:00 | SK |
If nobody fills this in for two weeks, delete the sheet rather than nagging
Open the Stages sheet before you type a single deal. Six stages is plenty and four is often better; every extra stage is a decision somebody has to make every week for the rest of the year. Write an exit criterion for each one — the thing that must be demonstrably true before a deal can move — and if you cannot write one, that stage is a feeling rather than a stage, and it should be deleted.
The probability column is deliberately locked to the stage rather than to the deal. This will annoy your best salesperson within a fortnight, because they will have a deal they are certain about sitting at 40%. Let it annoy them. Per-deal probabilities make the forecast a negotiation instead of an arithmetic, and the forecast is the only reason this file exists.
Two hygiene rules keep it alive. First, nothing sits in the Deals sheet after it closes: won and lost rows move to an archive tab in the same file, so the open pipeline is always the truth. Second, every row has a next step with a date. Sort by Last activity every Friday, and anything older than thirty days either gets a next step or moves to Stalled with a stated reason.
Review it standing up, once a week, in fifteen minutes, in stage order from the closest close date backwards. Do not review the whole file. Review the deals that moved, the deals that should have moved and did not, and the forecast gap. If the meeting takes longer than fifteen minutes, the pipeline has more stages than your business needs.
Kanaka Foods run a thirty-four person food manufacturer. They used this file for eleven months before moving into Flow, and they let us publish the last version of it.
The arithmetic in this file is fine forever. What breaks is everything that happens after somebody says yes: the quote gets retyped into a document, the document gets retyped into an invoice, and the project gets started from a conversation rather than from what was sold.
That is the point at which a pipeline needs to be part of a record rather than a file. Flow keeps the same seven columns you are used to, and then carries the agreed lines into delivery and billing without anybody retyping them.
The moment there is a second editor there is a second version, and the newer one is not always the right one.
Every retyping is a chance to be wrong about price, scope or date. Usually all three, eventually.
The customer rings about the thing you sold them, and the person answering has no idea what that was.
Three years of history in a file nobody can search is not history, it is storage.
No. The download is a direct link, there is no gate and no follow-up sequence. We would rather you took the file, used it for a year and remembered where it came from.
Yes. Open the XLSX in Google Sheets and the SUMIFS, the lookups and the data validation all carry over intact. There is one file rather than two editions, so there is no wrong one to pick.
Please do, if nobody will fill it in. A sheet that is two weeks stale makes the whole file feel untrustworthy, and the Next step column already carries the important half of it.
Because a forecast built from per-deal optimism is a negotiation, not a number. If you disagree, the lookup is in column I and takes thirty seconds to unlock — we would just rather you did it deliberately.
Sometimes. Teams use the Stages sheet on its own to redesign stages before rebuilding them in software, which is much cheaper than doing it live in a system everybody is already using.