How LeanDeals works

Quick start

Five steps that get LeanDeals actually running. You'll find the same list inside the app on the Dashboard, where steps tick themselves off as you complete them.

1. 1
   Create your workspace Right after signing up you'll name it — usually after your company. A workspace is where all your data lives.
2. 2
   Add your first company and contact Create a customer under Organizations and the person you deal with under Contacts. Link them so you always know who belongs where.
3. 3
   Create a deal Under Deals, add an opportunity, set its value and attach it to an organization. It lands in the first stage of your pipeline.
4. 4
   Connect your email Under Email, connect any mailbox over IMAP. Your conversations then match themselves to contacts and deals.
5. 5
   Invite your team Invite the rest of the team by email under Workspace. A CRM only pays off once the whole sales team is in it.

Core concepts

Six ideas make up the whole product. Once these click, the rest of the app explains itself.

Workspace

The workspace is the top level — everything else lives inside it. You create one right after signing up and can rename it any time.

Switching workspaces

You can belong to several workspaces at once — say, your own company plus one you help out with. Switch the active one from the Workspace item in the sidebar. The whole app always follows whichever workspace is currently active.

Data isolation

Workspaces are separated at the database level, not just in the interface. Only members of a workspace can reach its records — including through the API.

Roles and permissions

Owner and admin are not the same thing. There is exactly one owner — whoever created the account — and only they can reach billing and the subscription. There can be many admins: they configure the CRM and can see and edit everything, but billing stays out of reach. A member works with the records.

Ownership cannot be transferred self-service yet — write to us and we will move it for you.

Dashboard

The first screen after signing in. It answers one question: what needs your attention today.

• New leads today — deals added today.
• Won and Lost — count and total value of closed deals.
• Today — reminders due today.
• Overdue — what slipped and needs catching up.

Until you've finished the Quick start, you'll also see a Getting started with LeanDeals panel that walks you through it and ticks itself off.

Importing data

The fastest way to get going. Instead of retyping everything, upload a file and your data is in within a minute. Import is included on every plan, the cheapest one too.

How it works

1. Under Import, pick what you are uploading — organizations, contacts or deals.
2. Upload a CSV or XLSX file.
3. We show you how we read the columns. Czech and English headers are both understood, so "Company", "Amount" and "Employees" land correctly on their own. Anything we got wrong, you remap.
4. Confirm, and the data is imported.

What happens to duplicates

Contacts are matched on email and companies on name. When a record already exists in your workspace we match it rather than creating a second one. The summary shows you separately how many were created and how many were matched.

A bad row will not stop you

If a row has a malformed email or is missing something required, the rest imports normally and you get a list of which rows failed and why. Fix those in your file and upload them again.

Undoing an import

Every import remembers exactly which records it created. Undo deletes those and nothing else — records that already existed and were merely matched stay untouched.

Limits

Up to 5 MB, 2,000 rows and 60 columns per file — split anything bigger. The legacy .xls format is not supported; save as .xlsx or .csv.

Organizations

Your company directory. Each organization shows its contacts, deals, notes, reminders and email history in one place.

Adding an organization

Under Organizations, add a new company and fill in its name — everything else is optional and can wait. Any custom fields you've configured show up right in the form.

Archiving

You don't have to delete a company you've stopped working with — archive it instead. It disappears from everyday lists but keeps its history, and you can find it through search under the Archived tab.

Contacts

The people you talk to. Link a contact to an organization and you'll see who's involved from the company's side, and who they work for from the person's side.

What a contact holds

• Basic details — name, email, phone, job title.
• The organization they belong to.
• Deals they're involved in.
• Notes and reminders kept against them.
• Email history, once you've connected a mailbox.

Deals & pipeline

The heart of the tool. A deal is an opportunity moving through stages from first enquiry to close.

Creating a deal

Under Deals, add a new opportunity. Give it a name and value, attach an organization or contact, and it appears in the first stage of the selected board.

Moving through stages

Drag deals between columns as the conversation actually progresses. Each column shows its deal count and total value, so you can see at a glance where the pipeline is clogging up.

Kanban vs. table

Use the view toggle to switch between kanban (visual pipeline, good for daily work) and table (better when you need to filter, sort and work through a list). In table view you also choose which columns to show.

What a card shows

A deal card shows its name, its value and chips for the contact and organization behind it. Click a chip and that record opens in the side panel, without leaving the board.

Quick filters

Above both the board and the table sits a row of quick filters — status (open, won, lost, all) and owner. They apply to both views at once, so switching between kanban and table never changes what you are looking at. The block folds away when you need the room for the board itself; the tool remembers whether you keep it open, and while folded its header spells out what is selected. Your choices survive closing the browser, separately for each workspace.

Won and lost deals

Mark a closed deal won or lost. It leaves the active pipeline but counts toward your Dashboard stats — so it stops cluttering your view of what's still live.

Filters

Filters let you build your own conditions — by value, stage, organization, date or custom fields. Handy for questions like "which deals over 100k haven't moved in a month". The same rule set drives both the board and the table.

To find a deal by name, use the global search in the top bar — the Deals section has no search field of its own, so the board gets as much room as possible.

Boards & stages

Creating a workspace gives you a Main board with ready-made stages — New lead, Meeting, Offer sent, Decision. Treat them as a starting point, not a rule.

Editing stages

Under Board settings you can add stages, rename them, reorder them and change their colour. One tip from practice: stick to four to six stages. More columns means more decisions on every move, and people quietly stop keeping it up to date.

Multiple boards

You can create several boards and switch between them. Worth doing when you run genuinely separate processes — new business on one, renewals on another. Each board has its own set of stages.

Reminders

Tasks with a due date. Create one on its own under Reminders, or directly on a deal, contact or organization — where it stays attached to that record.

Filter the list by state:

• Pending — everything not yet done.
• Today — due today.
• Overdue — past due, worth looking at first.
• Completed — done, for looking back.

Beyond state, you can narrow the list by activity type, by owner and by whether a task is done. The whole filter block folds away so the list itself comes first; the tool remembers whether you keep it open, and while folded its header spells out what is selected.

Who it belongs to

Every task has an owner — the one person responsible for it. It starts out as whoever created it, and you can hand it to a colleague at any time from the task itself. The due-date e-mail goes to the owner, so passing a task on passes the nudge on with it.

Above the list you can switch between Everyone, Assigned to me and a particular colleague. A task can also be left Unassigned — useful for something the team picks up rather than one named person. Nobody is nudged about an unassigned task, so it is worth claiming the ones that matter.

Notes

You can write notes on anything — a deal, a contact, an organization. This is where meeting outcomes, agreed terms and anything you'd otherwise dig out of your inbox belong.

Add a note from the record's detail view, where it stays in context. A roll-up of every note lives under Notes in the sidebar, and notes are covered by global search too.

Search

One field across the whole workspace. It covers deals, contacts, organizations, notes, reminders, boards and stages. Type at least two characters and hit Enter.

Results are grouped by record type. Switch to the Archived tab to find organizations you archived earlier.

Automations

Rules that watch the pipeline for you. A rule is always one trigger and one action — deliberately, so it can be understood at a glance and never needs debugging.

What can trigger a rule

• A deal enters a stage — reacts to movement in your pipeline.
• A deal sits idle in a stage — after a number of days you choose. This is the one that actually rescues forgotten deals.
• A deal is created
• A contact is created

What a rule can do

• Create a reminder due in X days
• Move the deal to a stage
• Assign an owner
• Send an email notification

Run history

Each rule shows how many times it ran and what it actually did. When something does not run, the reason is there — the target stage was deleted, say, or the user being assigned has left the workspace.

Safety rails

Rules cannot set each other off endlessly: three independent guards prevent loops, and each workspace has an hourly cap on runs. If you hit it, you will see it in the run history. You can create up to twenty rules.

Automations also apply to records that arrive through import or a lead form, not only to what you enter by hand.

Lead capture

Enquiries from your website and your ads land straight in the pipeline. No retyping from email, no middleman like Make or Zapier.

Web form

Create a form, choose its fields and which stage leads should land in. Then either share it as a link or embed it on your own site with a single line of code. A submission becomes a contact, and optionally a company and a deal.

Starter includes one form, Professional unlimited.

Leads from Meta ads

If you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, connect your lead forms directly. A new lead appears in your pipeline within seconds of being submitted — while the person is still interested and worth calling. Part of the Professional plan.

Spam protection

Forms are public, so we guard them: a hidden bot trap, a submission-speed check, per-address rate limiting and content scoring. Anything that looks like spam is set aside and does not create a CRM record — but it stays visible to you, so a false positive is one click away from becoming a real lead.

Email

The strongest part of LeanDeals. Connect a mailbox and your conversations match themselves to contacts and deals — no more hunting through your inbox for the history of a negotiation.

Connecting over IMAP

For Gmail, a custom domain or any other provider, use IMAP. You'll need:

• your email address,
• the IMAP server address and port (check your provider's help pages),
• a username (usually the same as the email address),
• a password — ideally an app password rather than your main account password.

The password is stored encrypted. You can also pick which folder to read and how many days of history to pull in.

How syncing works

The first sync runs in the background and can take several hours on a large mailbox — feel free to close the app, messages will appear on their own. After that the mailbox is checked continuously, so new conversations show up without you doing anything.

Matching to contacts and deals

Messages match on the sender's and recipient's email address. When something doesn't match automatically, assign it yourself with Link contact or Link deal. Messages that don't belong in the CRM can be hidden — they stay in your mailbox but stop cluttering the history.

Disconnecting

Disconnect a mailbox any time under Email. Messages already pulled in stay in the CRM, but nothing new is fetched.

Custom fields

When the standard details aren't enough, add your own — on organizations, contacts and deals. Typically industry, lead source, company number or contract reference.

Creating a field

In Custom fields settings you choose:

• Entity type — whether the field belongs to an organization, a person or a deal.
• Label and key — the label is what users see, the key is what the API uses.
• Field type — text, number, date, a list of options and more.
• Required — whether everyone has to fill it in.
• Visible to API — whether the field is exposed through the public API.

Visibility

For each field you decide separately whether it appears while creating a record or only in its detail view. That keeps the quick-add form short and leaves the details for later.

Team & roles

Invite colleagues by email under Workspace settings. They get an invitation link and land straight in your workspace once they've signed up.

Roles

Remove members in the same place you invite them. Records a removed member created stay in the workspace — you don't lose data.

Billing

Free trial

Every new workspace gets 14 days free, no card required, with Professional features unlocked. When it ends the workspace locks until you pick a plan — your data stays exactly where it was and comes straight back once you activate.

Plans

• Starter — directory, pipeline, reminders, data import, one web lead form and limited API access.
• Professional — everything in Starter plus full email sync over IMAP, automation rules, unlimited forms, leads from Meta ads, wider API access and priority support.
• Custom — tailored changes, custom integrations and personal onboarding. Agreed case by case.

Current prices are on the pricing page.

Payment

Activate a plan inside the app on the Pricing page. Payments are handled by Paddle, which also issues your invoices. Your card details never reach us.

Cancelling

Cancel in workspace settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for — nothing is cut short.

Billing is per workspace. If you run several, each has its own plan and its own trial.

API & integrations

LeanDeals has a public API for wiring your data into the rest of your stack — through Make, or your own script.

API keys

Create a key in workspace settings. Each key gets a name and a set of scopes, so an integration only reaches what it actually needs. The key is shown once, at creation — save it somewhere safe right away.

What the API covers

Reading and writing organizations, people, deals, boards, stages, notes, reminders and custom fields. A key is always scoped to the workspace it was created in.

For the exact list of endpoints and their parameters, see the API reference.

API reference

Full technical documentation for every endpoint — parameters, sample requests, and an interactive console you can try calls from right in the browser.

The essentials

Example request

curl https://api.lean-deals.com/v1/organizations \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Create a key in workspace settings — the steps are in API & integrations.

FAQ

Support

Didn't find what you were looking for? Get in touch — Professional plans include priority support over email and phone.