Deal Notes & Files
Deals in PMSuite carry more context than their structured fields (Deal Name, Pipeline, Deal Stage, Deal Value, Close Date, Deal Category, Deal Agent, Products and Deal Watcher) can hold. Notes let your team record what was said and decided; attached files let you keep the documents that go with the deal — proposals, signed paperwork, requirement sheets — beside the record instead of in someone's inbox. Together they keep the deal readable by anyone who picks it up later.
Who can use it
- Company Admins — full access to deals in the company.
- The Deal Agent assigned to the deal, and any Deal Watcher added to it.
- Everyone else sees deals only as far as Settings → Roles & Permissions allows. Deal visibility is permission-driven — each role's Deals permission is set to one of None, Added (records the user created), Owns (records assigned to them) or All — so a user without view rights will not reach a deal at all.
If someone reports they cannot see a deal, its notes, or its files, check Roles & Permissions first, then have them log out and back in — permission changes do not always take effect in an already-active session.
Prerequisites
- A deal must already exist. See Creating Deals.
- The user must have permission to view the deal (see above).
How to Access
- Go to /account/deals (Sales → Deals in the sidebar).
- Open the deal you want to work on.
- Use the deal's Notes and Files sections on the detail view.
Related sales destinations: Lead Contacts at /account/lead-contact, Clients at /account/clients, Proposals at /account/proposals.
Working with notes
Notes are free text attached to a single deal. Use them for the things that never fit a dropdown:
- What happened on a call or in a meeting, and what was agreed.
- Who the decision-maker is and what still has to be approved on the client's side.
- Requirements the client stated in their own words.
- Internal reasoning about how to move the deal to its next stage.
Practical habits that hold up well:
- Write the note immediately after the interaction, while the detail is still exact.
- Lead with date and interaction type, e.g. "5 March — Call: client asked for revised pricing on 50 seats."
- Read the existing notes before your next client contact so you do not re-ask questions the client already answered.
Notes stay with the deal, which matters at handoff: when a deal moves to a different Deal Agent, the incoming agent inherits the written history rather than a verbal briefing.
Working with files
Attach the documents that belong to the deal — the proposal you sent, the requirement sheet the client returned, the signed agreement, supporting slides. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations and images are all handled the same way — pick the file from the deal's file upload area.
Naming is the single biggest quality-of-life factor:
- Use descriptive, self-explanatory filenames — "Acme-Annual-License-Signed-2026.pdf" beats "Document1.pdf".
- Upload the final version, and if you must keep more than one, put the version in the name.
Effect on other features
- Follow-ups: notes carry the detail behind the short outcome you log in Deal Follow-ups.
- Winning the deal: when a deal's stage is set to Win, the associated lead auto-converts to a Client record — this is the only trigger for lead-to-client conversion. Notes and files stay on the deal record; nothing is copied to the new client automatically, so if a document matters to the client relationship, re-attach it where it is needed.
- Projects: a project is never created automatically when a deal is won. If the won deal's notes and files describe the work to be delivered, create the project manually at /account/projects/create and re-attach the relevant documents there — projects have their own Files and Notes tabs.
- Proposals and estimates: documents kept on the deal are reference material only; the sendable, client-facing versions live in Proposals and Estimates.
Limitations
- Notes and files do not travel with a conversion. Winning a deal converts the lead to a client, but the deal's notes and attachments are not copied onto the client, project, invoice or contract. Workaround: re-upload the few documents the downstream record genuinely needs (contract to the Contracts module, delivery scope to the project) and keep the deal itself as the archive.
- They are deal-scoped, not a single searchable stream across the pipeline. Workaround: keep a consistent note prefix (date + interaction type) so a reader can scan a deal's history quickly, and use Deal Reports for cross-deal analysis of the structured fields.
- Access follows deal permissions, not per-note permissions. Anyone who can open the deal can read what is on it. Workaround: keep genuinely sensitive commercial commentary out of deal notes and control access at the role level in Settings → Roles & Permissions.
Troubleshooting
A user cannot see the deal, its notes or its files. Check Settings → Roles & Permissions for their role and confirm the Deals permission is set wide enough (Added / Owns / All) for the record in question. After changing a permission, have the user log out and back in; an active session may keep the old permission set.
An image upload is rejected even though the file looks small. Some PMSuite upload areas cap image dimensions rather than byte size — the white-label logo upload, for instance, rejects anything over 750px × 750px regardless of file weight. If a small image is refused, resize it down before retrying.
A file type will not attach. Export the document to PDF and attach that instead — PDF also previews more reliably for clients.
Nobody knows what happened on the deal. That is a process gap rather than a product one: the deal is only as informative as the notes on it. Make a short note after every client contact the team's default.