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 Settings → Users. 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.

A member with no further role can do anything with records. When you want a salesperson to delete only their own deals, or a colleague to only read the data, give them a custom role – see Team & roles.

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 – events 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.

On a phone the Dashboard starts with who to call today: today's and overdue events come first, the figures follow in two columns and Getting started comes last. Calls due today or overdue have a Call button right there (see LeanDeals on your iPhone).

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, events 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 events 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.

Above the table sits a row of stages, each with its deal count. Tap a stage to narrow the table to it, so the table still tells you where a deal sits on the board. The app remembers which view you picked, separately for your computer and your phone.

On a phone, Deals opens straight in the table with the stages on top – a board scrolls awkwardly on a narrow screen and cards are hard to drag with a finger. Quick filters start folded on a phone.

Column widths

In the deal, contact and organization tables, drag the right edge of a column header to resize the column. Double-click the edge to fit the content. Text that no longer fits ends in an ellipsis and shows in full on hover. Widths are remembered in this browser, separately for each table.

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.

Contact and organization in the side panel

Below the stages, the deal side panel shows a card with two rows – the contact person and the organization. Each row has its own Link button while it is empty, and a pencil to change the link once one is set. Click the name to open that record. There is no need to open the full deal detail for this.

Moving a deal to another board

With more than one board, the deal detail shows the board above the stages. Use Move to another board to send the deal elsewhere – it lands in the first stage of the target board. A board without any stages cannot take a deal; add a stage in its board settings first.

Merging duplicate deals

When the same deal ends up in LeanDeals twice – say from a form and by hand –, open the one you want to keep and click Merge with another deal in its header. Pick the duplicate (deals with the same contact or organization are listed first) and confirm. The duplicate's notes, events, e-mails and history move to the deal you kept. Details the kept deal is missing (amount, contact, organization, owner, custom fields) are filled in from the duplicate; anything already filled in stays as it is. The duplicate is then deleted.

A merge cannot be undone. You can only merge a deal you are allowed to delete, into a deal you are allowed to edit.

Deleting a deal

The bin icon in the deal detail deletes it. You have a few seconds to Undo; after that the deletion is confirmed on its own. Delete now skips the wait. If you close the tab or reload the page in the meantime, the deletion is completed and the deal does not come back. Deleting boards, stages, contacts, organizations and events works the same way.

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 and reorder them. 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.

Events

Tasks, meetings, calls and e-mails with a due date. Create one on its own under Events, 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 an event 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 event 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 event itself. The due-date e-mail goes to the owner, so passing an event on passes the nudge on with it.

Above the list you can switch between Everyone, Assigned to me and a particular colleague. An event can also be left Unassigned – useful for something the team picks up rather than one named person. Nobody is nudged about an unassigned event, 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.

Formatting

You format a note as you type and see it the way it will be saved – bold, italic, strikethrough, links, bullet or numbered lists. A small toolbar under the text has the same actions. Shortcuts work too:

• ⌘/Ctrl + B bold, ⌘/Ctrl + I italic, ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + X strikethrough
• ⌘/Ctrl + K link
• ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + 8 bullet list, ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + 7 numbered list

Text pasted from elsewhere drops its foreign formatting (colours, fonts) and keeps just the text.

Search

One search across the whole workspace. Open it with ⌘/Ctrl + K, the / key, or a click on the Search field in the sidebar. A large window opens over the page and searches deals, contacts, organizations, notes, events and boards. Before you type anything, it lists the pages you can jump to.

Arrow keys move through the results, Enter opens the record's detail page and Esc closes the window. Hold ⌘/Ctrl (with Enter or a click) and the record opens in the side panel instead, leaving the page underneath where it is.

All results opens a full page with results grouped by record type. Switch to the Archived tab there to find organizations you archived earlier.

Keyboard shortcuts

On a computer you can get around LeanDeals without the mouse. Press ? at any time to see the list.

Letter shortcuts do nothing while you are typing in a field. The G letters follow the Czech page names, so they stay the same in either language. Note formatting shortcuts are under Notes.

LeanDeals on your iPhone

Add LeanDeals to your iPhone Home Screen and open it like any other app – full screen, no address bar. Call straight from your events with one tap and log the outcome as soon as you hang up. Nothing is installed from the App Store and your CRM contacts are never copied to the phone.

Adding it to your Home Screen

1. 1
   Open app.lean-deals.com in Safari Only Safari can add it to the Home Screen, not Chrome or other browsers.
2. 2
   Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen Share is the square with an arrow pointing up in the bottom bar. Scroll the list down to find Add to Home Screen, then confirm with Add in the top right.
3. 3
   Open LeanDeals from the Home Screen and log in The Home Screen app has its own storage, so it does not share your Safari login. You log in once and stay logged in.

Calling from your phone

Every open call whose contact has a phone number gets a green phone button in the events list and on the Overview. Tap it and your iPhone dials the number. When you come back to LeanDeals after the call, the app asks “How did it go?” – pick the outcome, add a note and schedule the next step right away. The next-step prompt only appears when the deal has no other event planned.

If you cancel the Call / Cancel dialog before dialling, the app does not ask anything.

Call sits next to every phone number in LeanDeals – on a contact, in a deal, by the people at a company and in tables. If the deal (or contact) has planned events, the app first asks whether the call was one of them – the outcome then closes the one you pick. Otherwise, or when you choose Log as a new call, it is saved as a new call on the contact (and the deal, if you called from one) once you log the outcome.

How your computer calls

In Settings → Phone you choose what happens when you click Call on a computer:

• Send to my phone – the call arrives as a notification on your iPhone (all phones that are turned on, or one you pick).
• Call from this computer – opens the calling app on your computer, such as FaceTime via iPhone, Teams or a softphone.
• Just show the number – shows the number large, ready to copy; dial it on a desk phone or another phone.

Whichever you pick, LeanDeals asks how the call went afterwards.

Calling from your computer through your iPhone

Working at your computer but want to call from your own mobile? Click Call on the computer, a notification arrives on your iPhone, one tap dials the number and you log the outcome on the computer. Turn it on once:

1. On your iPhone, open LeanDeals from the Home Screen (not in Safari).
2. Go to Settings → Phone and tap Turn on for this phone.
3. Allow notifications.

Then it works like this:

1. On the computer, click Call on a call in Events. A Sent to your phone window opens.
2. A notification with the contact's name appears on your iPhone. Tap it, then tap Call.
3. The phone dials and “How did it go?” opens on the computer meanwhile. Log the outcome there after the call.

If you don't tap the notification within three minutes, the computer stops waiting and offers to send it again or dial another way. You can turn on more than one device – the notification goes to all of them. The list of devices is in Settings → Phone, where you can also remove them.

Finding your way in Settings

Everything you can configure is in one place – Settings in the sidebar. The list of sections on the left has two parts:

• My account – Account and password, Appearance and language, Notifications, Phone and Personal API keys. These apply to you alone.
• Workspace – General (switching workspace, default currency, leaving the workspace), Users, User roles, Workspace API keys, Custom fields, Event types and Billing. These apply to the whole team; most of them only the owner and admins can change.

On a phone, Settings opens as a list of sections, much like the iPhone's Settings app. A section opens full screen, and the arrow at the top left takes you back to the list.

Dark mode

Under Settings → Appearance and language, pick Light, Dark or Match system – LeanDeals then follows your computer or phone. The choice applies to the browser you set it in. The public lead form on your website always stays light.

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 an event 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, 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. We set up the page connection for you: email info@lean-deals.com, we send a short checklist and take care of the rest.

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.

Gmail: turn on 2-Step Verification in your Google account, create an "app password" under security settings and use the server imap.gmail.com, port 993, SSL. Google only offers app passwords once 2-Step Verification is on. Seznam: server imap.seznam.cz, port 993.

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 Settings → Users. They get an invitation link and land straight in your workspace once they've signed up.

Roles

Custom roles

When not every member should be able to do everything, create a custom role under Settings → User roles – say Sales or Implementer. A new role starts from one of three templates (Sales, Full access, Read only) and you adjust it from there. For deals, contacts, organizations, events and notes you set separately:

• Add – whether they may create new records.
• Edit and Delete – None, Own or All. Own means records they own (for events also the ones they created, for notes the ones they wrote).
• Export – for now this means reading data through the API.

On top of that, three switches: Boards and stages (create, edit and delete boards and stages), Data import and Own API keys.

Assign a role under Settings → Users – for each member pick Admin, Member (full access) or one of your custom roles. The app then follows the role: what someone may not do, they don't see (the bin on other people's deals, say, or the button for a new record). Delete a role and the people who had it go back to full member access. Roles apply in the API too.

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, events, data import, a kick-off consultation and data import with our help included, one web lead form and the REST API.
• Professional – everything in Starter plus full email sync over IMAP, automation rules, unlimited forms, leads from Meta ads, up to 20 automation rules 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 under Settings → Personal API keys. 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. The owner and admins see every member's keys under Settings → Workspace API keys and can revoke them.

A key can never do more than the person who created it. If they have a custom role, it applies to the key as well: reading follows Export, creating follows Add, updates follow Edit and deletes follow Delete. Without Export, a key can only be given write scopes and read access to settings (workspaces, boards, stages, custom fields), so an integration that only writes can still find the IDs it needs. When the key's creator leaves the workspace, the key stops working.

What the API covers

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

The API can also merge duplicate deals (POST /v1/deals/{id}/merge with the duplicate's merge_id) – just like the app: the deal in the URL stays, the duplicate is moved into it and deleted. Handy for cleaning up data in bulk. The key needs the deals.write scope, and its owner must be allowed to edit the kept deal and delete the duplicate.

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.

Reporting a problem

When something in the app doesn't work, click Report a problem in the sidebar (on a phone it's in the menu). Describe what happened and attach a screenshot if you like (PNG, JPG or WEBP up to 5 MB). We add the page address, your browser and the workspace ourselves.