As 2026 will be the Year of Making LACRM Easier, I have a couple of suggestions for pipelines
Be able to associate an email or note etc. with a pipeline.
I’ve realized that sales pipelines are better associated with the business not a contact. Sure, you can identify the contacts with the pipeline. However, during the sales process I want relevant emails - sent to contacts - to be associated and reviewable with the pipeline.
The same goes for notes. I’ve had notes posted that later become relevant. I want to associate those notes with the pipeline, and retain the original date.
Be able to modify the date of a note associated with a pipeline
Thanks for sharing those suggestions! We have talked about being able to associate an email with a pipeline. Our discussion was specific to an email log, but I could see how that might be helpful with notes as well. We do hope to add the ability to link an email to a pipeline in the future, but I’m afraid we don’t have a timeline on when something like that might happen.
It is definitely on our radar to add the ability to backdate pipeline item updates as well. Again we don’t have a timeline on that, so I’m afraid I can’t make any promises here.
totally agree on the email association one. right now i end up putting the email date and a summary into a pipeline note just so its all in one place, but then the actual email is still only on the contact record. would be great to just link it directly.
the backdating thing would help a lot too, especially when you forget to update a pipeline stage and want the dates to actually reflect when things happened.
Just to add a bit of technical and product design context to what Emily said above…
Regarding backdating notes on pipelines: That probably sounds like it would be easy to do, but there’s a reason we’ve avoided it thus far. Pipeline notes are actually always tied to a pipeline update, especially the status. When you save the note, it’s not just adding a note, it’s also saving the entire pipeline form (even if nothing has changed). The way this is stored in our database is that the note and status are both saved as the same update. That way, we can build a timeline of the statuses changing over time.
If you could change the data on a pipeline note, it would also change the date of the status, and that could in theory change that timeline (e.g. if you take an old note and move it to today, that should update the current status of the pipeline item). In order to do that, we’d have to loop through all notes and updates to that pipeline item and recreate the timeline based on the new date of the note. That’s possible to do, but it’s quite a bit more complicated than just changing the date like you can with normal notes. That’s why we haven’t built that yet.
TBH, if you’re going to get into changing pipelines, then you might want to rework how you hold the data in your database. One of the side effects of the current structure is that when the status is changed, the status on every note is changed. You cannot see the status changes as you progress forwards and backwards through the pipeline, because all notes will be changed to the current status.
When I worked in the software industry we’d say “Hey, if it was easy, somebody would already have done it”
@intista It should already work the way you’re describing. Here’s a screenshot showing a series of notes on a pipeline. You can see each where the status was at for each note, and updating the status shouldn’t change anything about the status on previous notes.
Oh, gotcha. Yeah, all the custom fields are only able to store the current version (there’s no historic logs of changes). That is something I’d love to add at some point although the demand for that is pretty low so we haven’t been able to prioritize it yet.
I think it’s possible that AI might change that. As more and more people connect AI agents to LACRM (we don’t even explicitly support that yet, but people are doing it via the API), the likelihood of people messing up their data will go way up, so keeping a full historic log of changes might become necessary. I could be wrong about that, but I think that’s one possible reason we might prioritize historic versioning eventually.
thanks for the technical explanation @tyler, that makes a lot of sense. the pipeline note = status update thing explains why it is not as simple as just slapping a date picker on there.
in the meantime, what i have been doing as a workaround for the email association issue is just pasting the key details from an email into a pipeline note with a reference like “(see email from 2/15)”. not ideal but at least everything important is visible in the pipeline timeline without having to jump back to the contact record.
