Managing Lost Deals

It hurts to lose a job, but deleting the enquiry hurts your business even more. In Rentablez an enquiry has only two states — it is either still open (labelled Pending, or Open before you’ve saved any progress) or it has been Converted To Order. There is no “Rejected” or “Cancelled” status, and that’s on purpose: a deal that didn’t close this week can still close next week. The trick to managing lost deals is simply to not delete them.

When a Deal Falls Through

When a client says “No,” leave the enquiry exactly where it is — as an open Pending enquiry — and record why.

  1. Open the enquiry from the Enquiries list.
  2. Scroll to the Notes field and write down the reason: “Price too high,” “Item unavailable for those dates,” “Went with a competitor,” and so on.
  3. Save. The enquiry stays in your pipeline as Pending, with the reason attached for future reference.

Don’t reach for Delete. Deleting is for genuine junk — duplicates or test entries. Once you delete an enquiry, its history is gone for good. (Delete requires the enquiries.write permission and is unavailable on enquiries that have already been converted.)

Why Keep Lost Enquiries?

If you delete every “No,” you are flying blind. Keeping them lets you spot patterns later:

  • “Did we keep losing jobs because we didn’t have enough Sony A7s?” — time to buy more cameras.
  • “Is our pricing scaring people off?” — the reasons in your Notes will tell you.
  • “Has this customer walked away from three quotes in a row?” — maybe don’t prioritise the next one.

Finding Your Open Deals Again

Every enquiry that never converted is still sitting in your pipeline. To review them:

  1. Go to the Enquiries list.
  2. Open the Filters panel and set Status to Pending.
  3. The list now shows only deals that are still up for grabs.

You can narrow further by Customer, Enquired On date, or Source (Phone, Email, Walk-in, Website, or Webstore) to focus on a particular slice of your pipeline.

Reviving a Deal

Sometimes a “No” becomes a “Yes” two weeks later. Because you never deleted or “closed” the enquiry, there’s nothing to re-activate — it’s still Pending. Just open it, refresh the dates or pricing if needed, download a fresh quote, and when the customer commits, convert it to an order.

Rentablez keeps every open deal on record so you can learn, adapt, and close more of them next time.