Getting Started with StretchCRM

StretchCRM is your organization's single system of record for sales, marketing, and service. Everything you track lives as one of a few connected record types, and every screen in the app is just a different way of working those records. This article gives you a fast, confident start.

What StretchCRM is

StretchCRM replaces the tangle of spreadsheets, shared inboxes, and sticky notes most teams use to manage customers. Instead, it keeps people, accounts, opportunities, and requests in one place and shows how they connect. Because StretchCRM is part of StretchSuite, you sign in with your normal workspace login and every record you create is automatically scoped to your organization — you only ever see and edit your own company's data.

The core objects

Almost everything in StretchCRM is one of these record types:

Object	What it holds
Contacts	People — email, name, phone, job title, lifecycle stage, lead status, lead score, and owner.
Companies	Accounts — domain, industry, employee count, annual revenue, lifecycle stage, and lead score.
Deals	Revenue opportunities moving through your Sales Pipeline stages.
Tickets	Support requests and issues moving through your Support Pipeline.
Activities	A permanent log of calls, emails, meetings, notes, and stage changes.
Tasks	Your follow-ups and reminders, with due dates and priorities.

These objects are linked. A contact belongs to a company; a deal is attached to a contact and a company; an activity or task can point at any of them. Learning this handful of records is 80% of learning StretchCRM.

Touring the dashboard

When you open StretchCRM you land on the overview dashboard, which summarizes the health of your CRM at a glance:

Active contacts and active companies — how many live people and accounts you're tracking.
Open deals and open pipeline value — the count and total dollar value of opportunities in flight.
Open tickets — support requests that still need attention.
Recent activity — how much your team has logged in the last 30 days.

From the dashboard, the left navigation takes you into each object's list view — Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, Tasks — plus the Pipeline board, Sequences, and the Intelligence view.

Your first fifteen minutes

Follow these steps to go from empty to a working pipeline:

Create a company. Go to Companies → New. Enter the account name (the only required field), and optionally a domain, industry, employee count, and annual revenue. Save.
Add a contact to it. Go to Contacts → New. Enter the person's email (required), first and last name, job title, and phone. In the Company field, choose the company you just created so the two records are linked.
Set the lifecycle stage and owner. On the contact, set the lifecycle stage (for example, Lead) and the owner — the teammate responsible for this relationship.
Create a deal. Go to Deals → New. Give it a title, attach the company and contact, and enter an amount. The deal starts in the first Sales Pipeline stage, New Lead.
Log an activity. Open the contact and log a Note or Call describing your first conversation. This also updates the contact's "last activity" timestamp.
Create a follow-up task. Add a Task — for example, "Send intro email" — with a due date so nothing slips.

That's a complete mini‑workflow: an account, a person, an opportunity, a logged touch, and a next step.

A worked example

Suppose you just spoke with Ava North, founder of Northstar Studio. You would:

Create the company Northstar Studio (domain northstar.example, industry Creative Services).
Create the contact Ava North (ava@northstar.example, job title Founder), linked to Northstar Studio, lifecycle stage Opportunity.
Create the deal "Northstar brand system and launch CRM" for $18,500, attached to Ava and Northstar.
Log a Call activity: "Intro call — wants a brand system plus CRM launch."
Add a Task: "Send proposal" due in two days.

In five minutes you've captured a real opportunity with full context that anyone on your team can pick up.

Tips

Email is the identity of a contact. It's required and must be unique, so it's the safest field to search and de‑duplicate on.
Attach everything. A deal without a company or contact is an island — always link records so the timeline and reporting work.
Amounts accept plain numbers. Type 18500 or 18500.00; StretchCRM stores the value precisely for you and defaults the currency to CAD.
Use owners from day one. Assigning an owner is what makes "who's responsible?" answerable later.

FAQ

Do I need to import data to start? No. You can create records by hand as you go. Importing is useful when you're migrating an existing book of business.

Can other teammates see what I create? Everyone in your organization shares the same CRM. Records are scoped to your org, so your team sees your org's data — and never any other customer's.

What's the difference between a task and an activity? A task is something you still need to do (it has a due date and a status). An activity is a record of something that already happened (a logged call, email, note, or stage change).