This guide walks the full Foundry CRM path using one concrete story: Northwind Systems knows it is busy but cannot say what it will close. You will see what each area is for, why it exists, and how Northwind uses it, with metaphors and diagrams along the way.
Northwind is a fourteen-person B2B software company with roughly £2.4M of open pipeline. Today that pipeline lives in a spreadsheet Priya maintains, a shared inbox where proposals go to die, and Daniel's memory. The website contact form emails one person. Nobody can answer "what will we close this quarter?" without two days of reconciling — and the answer is still a guess. They do not want a six-month CRM project. They want a number they trust by the end of the month.
A filing cabinet stores things. You put a deal in the "proposal" drawer and it sits there, as still and as silent as the day you filed it. A conveyor is different: every position on the belt means something, and things only ever move forward or off the end. Foundry CRM treats your pipeline as a conveyor:
A pipeline template gives you the stages. You set what each stage means and how likely a deal at that position is to close.
Capture forms and CSV imports put things onto the front of the belt automatically, instead of someone typing them in from an email.
The board is the belt. Cards move right as the deal progresses, and proposals and NDAs are what get them over the last gap.
Because every position carries a probability, the dashboard and forecast can add the belt up without anyone estimating anything.
Sign in, learn what is in the sidebar, and understand why a brand new workspace looks so quiet. It is meant to. You have not told it what you sell yet.
Foundry CRM is multi-tenant: every workspace is a sealed box. Signing in is how the app knows which pipeline to show you, and every query it runs is scoped to your team. Northwind never sees another company's deals, and no directory anywhere lists other customers.
You sign in once and land on the Dashboard. If your workspace has not been set up yet, you are sent to the onboarding wizard first — that is Stage 1. If someone invited you by email, your invite link takes you straight into their workspace with a pending membership until an admin approves it.
Ten destinations, and you will spend ninety percent of your time in three of them. Learn the shape once and you are never lost:
Where you land. Pipeline value, win rate, deal cycle, deals at risk, target attainment, plus the deals to progress and follow-ups due today.
Everything you owe someone, with due dates. The one screen that stops deals going quiet.
Pace against target, projected attainment, and a recommendation. Read by leadership, edited by nobody.
Who you sell to. Import wizards, custom fields and the record every deal hangs off.
The kanban belt. Cards, stages, drag to progress. This is where the working day happens.
Your catalogue with unit prices. Deal line items and proposal totals are built from it.
Deals by stage, pipeline value breakdown, by owner, by pipeline, with an AI performance summary and a shareable weekly link.
The configuration. Pipelines, stages, order and the win probability each stage carries.
Team and seats, brand, capture, connections, AI, custom fields, document templates, API keys, billing, notifications, data and audit.
Build a guided click-through of your own workspace — useful for onboarding a new hire or showing a prospect.
A brand new workspace has no deals, so every dashboard number is zero and the forecast has nothing to project. Do not go hunting for a demo dataset — the onboarding wizard offers you optional sample data if you want something to poke at. Otherwise, go to the Setup checklist on the dashboard and work down it.
Nothing else in Foundry CRM works until a workspace and a pipeline exist. You cannot create a deal without a stage to put it in. Stage 1 is that.
The first-run wizard names your workspace, picks your currency, and gives you a working pipeline in one pass — so you are never staring at a blank product wondering what a "stage" is supposed to be.
Most CRM projects die in week one, on the question "what should our stages be?". The wizard answers it for you with a template that matches how you sell, and you adjust from there. Getting it slightly wrong costs nothing — stages are editable forever.
Sign in → Onboarding
| What it asks | Why it matters | Northwind's answer |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace name | Names the tenant everything is scoped to; appears in the topbar switcher | Northwind Systems |
| Legal entity name | Used on proposals and NDAs where the trading name is not enough | Northwind Systems Ltd |
| Company website | Seeds brand settings and the capture form origin | northwind.example |
| Currency | Every deal value, quote total and forecast number is formatted in it | GBP |
| Pipeline template | Creates a pipeline and its stages so the board is usable immediately | B2B SaaS |
| Sample data | Optional demo records scoped to your team, so you can see a full board before yours exists | On, deleted after a week |
Lead → Qualified → Proposal → Negotiation → Closed Won. The longest belt, for deals with a real evaluation in the middle.
Inquiry → Discovery → Proposal → Verbal → Closed Won. Built around a scoping conversation rather than a product trial.
Lead → Pitch → Proposal → Closed Won. Four stages, because a pitch either lands or it does not.
Whichever you pick, Pipeline Config lets you rename, reorder, add and remove stages — and run more than one pipeline side by side.
Teams lose weeks arguing about whether "Qualified" should come before or after "Discovery". Pick the closest template, put this week's real deals on it, and let the friction tell you what to change. It will, within a fortnight.
Priya ran the wizard on a Tuesday morning. B2B SaaS template, GBP, sample data on. By eleven o'clock there was a board on the screen — someone else's fake deals, but a board. By the afternoon the fake deals were gone and eleven real ones were in their place.
You have a pipeline. Now give it the things it needs to be useful to more than one person: teammates, a brand, a product catalogue and stage probabilities.
Invite the people, load the catalogue, put your logo on the documents, and tell each pipeline stage how likely it is to close. This is the afternoon that makes every later screen correct.
Everything downstream borrows from here. The forecast borrows stage probabilities. Proposals borrow your brand and your product prices. Notifications borrow your team list. Skip this stage and the product still works — it is just quietly wrong in four places at once.
Settings → Teams
Invite teammates by email — they do not need an account first. An invite creates a pending membership; once accepted, they appear against a seat. Seat usage is visible in the workspace ("3 of 5 seats") so nobody discovers a limit mid-sale. Roles are deliberately plain-language: admins can change settings, integrations and destructive actions; members work deals.
Products & Services → Add product or service
Your catalogue: name, description, category and unit price. It matters more than it looks. When Daniel adds line items to a deal, he picks from this list, sets quantity or seats, and the quote total falls out. That same total is what the proposal prints. If your catalogue is wrong, your proposals are wrong.
Settings → Brand · Settings → Document templates
Logo, colours, company blurb and legal links. These are what a prospect actually sees, because proposals and NDAs are rendered on a public link with your brand on them, not Foundry's. Templates are selectable at send time, so a services proposal and a licence renewal can look different.
Pipeline Config → Stage editor
This is the single most consequential screen in the product, and it takes ten minutes. Each stage gets a name, a position and a win probability. The probability is what turns a board into a forecast.
The temptation is to set every stage optimistically so the weighted number looks healthy. Resist it — you are only lying to yourself, one quarter in advance. Start from your actual historical win rate at each stage. If you do not have one, start conservative and correct after a quarter of real data.
A period target is what turns the forecast into "are we on pace?" and lights up the sidebar's target bar.
The handful of things you record that nobody else does. They appear on the company and contact modals and come back through the API.
Workspace AI is a switch. On, you get deal scoring, drafted follow-ups and note summaries against a visible credit meter. Off, nothing calls a model.
Task reminders, proposal viewed, NDA signed, and a daily or weekly "deals to progress" digest — set per person, not per workspace.
The belt is built. Now stop typing leads in by hand and let your own website feed it.
A form on your own website that creates the contact, the company, the deal in the right stage, the owner and the follow-up task — instead of emailing one person who might be on leave.
The gap between "someone was interested" and "someone is working it" is where most small companies leak revenue. Every manual step in that gap is a place a lead can be dropped. Capture removes all of them: the lead is a working card before anyone has read an email.
The classic "contact us". Creates a contact and a deal in the pipeline and stage you nominated, owned by the person you nominated.
Content behind a form. Creates the contact and issues a signed unlock link with an expiry, so the whitepaper is not just sitting on a public URL.
Sign-ups with tags, a capacity limit, a confirmation email and a calendar link. Useful for webinars and workshops.
Source label, form name and UTMs are stored on the contact and the deal, so "where did this come from?" is answerable months later.
Settings → Capture → New form
You give the form a name and a mode, choose its fields (email, phone, select, textarea and so on), then set the routing: which pipeline, which stage, which owner. Turn on create a task on submit if you want a follow-up to appear automatically. Write a thank-you message. Save.
Foundry then hands you two ways to use it: an embed snippet to paste into your site, or a hosted form URL if you would rather link to it. There are copy-paste instructions for WordPress, Webflow and plain HTML right in the settings screen.
Public forms attract bots. Every capture route ships with a honeypot field and rate limiting, and you can add a Turnstile challenge if a particular form gets targeted. Per-form analytics — views, submits, conversion — tell you whether a form is working, or just quietly broken.
Companies & Contacts → Import
You almost certainly have a spreadsheet of contacts already. The import wizard maps your columns to fields, shows you a duplicate review step before anything is committed, and imports companies, contacts and products. Nothing lands until you have looked at what it is about to do.
Sofia replaced the mailto link on the pricing page with a Lead form routed to Daniel, put a Gate in front of the integration whitepaper, and set the webinar page up as an Event with a capacity of 80. The shared inbox stopped being load-bearing. Nobody has argued about who was supposed to reply to a lead since.
Cards are arriving on their own. Stage 4 is what you do with them.
The pipeline board is the belt, and the opportunity detail is what is inside each box. This is the screen your team has open all day, so it is the one worth learning properly.
A list of deals tells you what exists. A board tells you where everything is — and, at a glance, where it is stuck. Moving a card is a deliberate act, which is exactly why it is a trustworthy signal: nothing changes stage by accident.
Pipeline Board
One column per stage, one card per deal, showing the company, the value and the state of its documents. Drag a card to the next column to progress it. The moment you do, the weighted forecast changes, the activity log records it, and any automation you have wired to stage changes fires.
Pipeline Board → any card → Opportunity detail
| Tab / panel | What it holds | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Deal details | Company, primary contact, stage, value, owner, close date | Every time the shape of the deal changes |
| Pipeline progress | Where the deal sits on the belt and how it got there | Before a pipeline review |
| Products / services | Line items with quantity or seats, unit price, line total, quote total | Before you send a proposal |
| Notes | Free-text history of what was actually said | After every real conversation |
| Emails | Logged email conversations against the deal | When you need to know who said what |
| Documents | Proposals and NDAs, with their signed copies | Any time someone asks "did they sign?" |
| Follow-ups | Tasks with due dates against this deal | The moment you promise anyone anything |
| AI deal analysis | Risk signals and suggested next actions | When a deal feels off and you cannot say why |
Tasks & Follow-ups
Every promise you make becomes a task with a due date. The dashboard surfaces follow-ups due and deals to progress; notifications remind you as due dates approach; and an optional daily or weekly digest emails you the list. A deal going quiet stops being something you discover by accident.
If workspace AI is on, a deal can be scored against its own history: what the risk signals are, what to do next, and a drafted follow-up if you want one. It can refresh automatically when a deal changes stage. Every call is metered against a visible credit balance, and the whole feature is a single switch you can turn off.
The strongest temptation in any CRM is to leave dead deals sitting in Proposal because closing them as lost feels like an admission. Do not. Use Close deal, record the loss reason, and let it go. Your win rate, your deal cycle and your forecast are all built from closed deals — a board full of zombies makes every one of those numbers a lie.
Somewhere around the Proposal stage, a deal needs a document. Stage 5 is how it leaves and how it comes back.
Proposals and NDAs built from the deal's own numbers, sent on your brand, signed on a public link, and filed straight back onto the deal.
The moment a proposal leaves as an email attachment, it stops being part of your pipeline. You cannot tell if it was opened, you cannot tell if it was signed, and the version that comes back lives in one person's inbox. Keeping the document attached to the deal closes that hole.
Opportunity detail → Send proposal
The proposal is assembled from the deal's own line items, so the quote total on the document and the value on the card cannot drift apart. You pick a template, set a valid-until date and a recipient email, and send. Your brand settings supply the logo, the colours and the legal links.
Your client gets a link. They do not need an account, a login or a PDF reader — the proposal opens as a page. The deal then tracks the state honestly: sent, viewed, signed, or amendments requested. When it is signed, the signed copy is filed under the deal's documents and the deal shows "signed proposal on file". If you have notifications on, you hear about the view and the signature as they happen.
Opportunity detail → Share NDA
Same path, different document. Share it, get it signed on a public link, and the deal shows "signed NDA on file" without anyone searching an inbox for an attachment from March. Templates are selectable at send time here too.
Opportunity detail → Close deal
Won or lost, close it explicitly. A won deal counts toward target attainment and can fire a Slack message or an outbound webhook. A lost deal takes a loss reason, which is the raw material for every "why are we losing?" conversation you will have later.
Transactional email is only as good as the domain it comes from. Send yourself a proposal and an NDA early, from a real external address, and check they arrive in the inbox rather than the spam folder. Sorting that out on a Tuesday is fine. Sorting it out while a client waits is not.
Daniel sent Meridian Logistics a £48,000 proposal on the Thursday. It was viewed twice on the Friday — which he knew, because the deal said so — so he called on the Monday instead of waiting politely for a fortnight. Signed on the Wednesday. The signed copy is under the deal, where Marcus in finance found it without asking anyone.
The loop is running. Stages 6 and 7 are where you get paid back for keeping it honest.
The dashboard, the forecast and the reports do not ask anyone for an estimate. They add up what the board already says — which is why they are worth trusting.
Reporting is usually a separate act of work: export, pivot, clean, argue. Here it is a read of the same records the team already maintains as part of selling. Nobody produces the number; the number is a consequence.
Dashboard
| What it shows | What it is telling you |
|---|---|
| Pipeline value | Everything open, at face value |
| Win rate | Won as a share of everything closed — only honest if you close your losses |
| Average deal cycle | How long a deal really takes, in days |
| Deals at risk | The ones that have gone quiet or slipped their close date |
| New this month | New deals created, against last month |
| Target attainment | Won value against the period target — this is the sidebar bar too |
| Deals by stage | The funnel, with empty stages still shown so gaps are visible |
| Weekly activity | Created, won and lost over the last eight weeks |
| Deals to progress · Follow-ups due | Your actual to-do list for today |
| Recent activity | What changed, and who changed it |
Forecast
The forecast answers one question: are we on pace? It compares actual won value against what you would expect by this point in the period, projects where you land if nothing changes, and shows projected attainment against target. Forecast categories and a recommendation sit alongside it. Filter by owner or pipeline when you need to know whose number is moving.
Reports
Deals by stage, pipeline value breakdown, performance by owner and by pipeline, filtered by close date range, stage, owner and pipeline. An AI performance summary puts the movement into words if workspace AI is on. Save the filter combinations you keep rebuilding — my deals, at risk, this quarter — and reuse them. Export any major list to CSV.
Some people need the numbers but will never log in — a board member, a co-founder, finance. The weekly sales report generates a shareable link they can open without a seat. This is usually the moment a leadership team stops asking for a slide deck.
The numbers are right inside Foundry. Stage 7 gets them out to everywhere else your company already looks.
Slack for the moments worth celebrating, webhooks for the systems that need to know, and a read API with your own keys for everything else.
A CRM nobody looks at is a CRM nobody updates. Pushing the interesting moments into the places your team already lives keeps it alive — and pushing the data into the systems that need it stops anyone re-keying deals into a second tool.
Settings → Connections → Incoming webhook URL
Paste a Slack incoming webhook URL and pick what goes to the channel: won deals and form submits are the two that earn their place. A won deal appearing in a team channel does more for CRM adoption than any training session.
Settings → Connections → Outbound webhooks
Give Foundry an HTTPS endpoint and it posts events as they happen — contact created, deal stage changed, proposal signed, deal won. Each request carries an X-Foundry-Signature header signed with your workspace's own secret, so your endpoint can verify it really came from your workspace. If you would rather not write an endpoint at all, there are documented Zapier and Make recipes.
Settings → API keys
Create a key and it is shown once. Keys are prefixed fcrm_, scoped to the workspace that created them, and revocable — a revoked key returns 401 immediately. Send it as Authorization: Bearer fcrm_… against /api/v1 for paginated reads of companies, contacts and opportunities, custom fields included.
CSV export sits on every major list. A full workspace export in JSON or CSV lives in Settings → Data, alongside the recycle bin and workspace deletion. Your data is yours, and leaving is a button rather than a support ticket.
Companies, contacts and deals soft-delete. Restore them here rather than rebuilding them from memory.
The activity log surfaced for admins: who changed what, and when. The answer to "who deleted that?".
Trial to paid via Stripe, with a customer portal. Plans cover seats, AI credits, form submissions and storage.
Record a click-through of your own workspace and share it — for onboarding a new hire, or walking a prospect through their own data.
X-Foundry-Signature header on your side before trusting a payload.GET /api/v1/companies with the bearer header.page, pageSize, total, items.That is the whole journey. The checklist puts it in one list you can work down in an afternoon.
Everything above, in the order Northwind actually did it. Stages 1 and 2 are one afternoon. Stage 3 is a morning. The rest is how you work from then on.
The spreadsheet has not been opened since March. Priya's pipeline review takes fifteen minutes instead of two days, and she spends it arguing about deals rather than about numbers. Marcus has a link. Sofia can tell you which page produced which won deal. And Daniel, who was the most sceptical of the four, has the board open on a second monitor all day — not because anyone asked him to, but because it is where his work is.
The questions that come up in the first fortnight, answered before you have to ask them.
Yes. Pipeline Config manages multiple pipelines, each with its own stages and probabilities. Capture forms route to a specific pipeline and stage, and the dashboard, forecast and reports can all be filtered by pipeline. New business and renewals are a common split.
Nothing is locked. Stages can be renamed, reordered, added and removed at any time from the stage editor. The template only decides what exists on day one so you are not staring at an empty board.
No. Proposals and NDAs are sent as a public signing link. The client opens a branded page, reads it and signs. The signed copy is filed back under the deal automatically.
No. Companies, contacts and deals are soft-deleted into a recycle bin and can be restored from Settings → Data. The audit trail in Settings shows who deleted it and when.
Yes. Workspace AI is a single switch in Settings → AI. With it off, nothing calls a model. With it on, usage is metered per workspace against a visible credit balance with a soft limit, so costs cannot run away quietly.
No. Every query is scoped to your team, inbound webhooks are authenticated with your own per-tenant secret, and there is no public directory listing other workspaces.
Share the weekly sales report link. It opens without a login and without consuming a seat — designed for a board member, a co-founder or finance who want the figures and nothing else.
Yes, three ways: CSV export from every major list, a full workspace export in JSON or CSV from Settings → Data, and a paginated public read API using bearer keys you create and revoke yourself.
Up to ten definitions per workspace. They appear on the company and contact modals and are returned by the public API. The limit is deliberate — a CRM with forty custom fields is one nobody fills in.
One pipeline, ten real deals, and honest stages. That alone gives you a weighted forecast and a win rate. Add the capture form when the board is already something your team looks at daily — not before.