Using Opportunities and Estimates before sales

For some businesses, sales to new and existing customers are not sure things until they have negotiated quite a bit and worked out all of the details. When this applies to your client, you'll want to help them set up and learn to use the Opportunities and Estimates in their accounts. Opportunities are used to track potential deals; the details typically start fuzzy and tend to get easier to set over time. The items, quantities, and prices can change as negotiations take place.

Here's an example of the top set of fields on a new Opportunity:

Figure 15.1 – A new Opportunity and its Status list in NetSuite

Opportunities can be created for deals that might never happen, so they're generally regarded as uncertain until they reach the Closed/Won status. These transactions also have a field that's used to track how confident we are about closing them, called Probability, which is expressed...