This article collects the questions StretchCRM customers ask most. For step‑by‑step help with a specific feature, see that feature's article; for error messages and unexpected behavior, see Troubleshooting Common Issues.
Getting started
What is StretchCRM in one sentence? It's your organization's single system of record for sales, marketing, and service — contacts, companies, deals, tickets, activities, and tasks, all connected.
Do I need a separate account? No. StretchCRM is part of StretchSuite; you use your normal workspace login, and your data is automatically scoped to your organization.
Can I start without importing data? Yes. Create records by hand as you go, or import an existing book of business when you're ready.
Data and privacy
Who can see the records I create? Everyone in your organization shares one CRM, so your team sees your org's data. You never see — and no one outside your org ever sees — another customer's data. Every read and write is hard‑filtered to your organization.
Is my customer data used to train models or shared across the suite? StretchCRM's intelligence features are governed and read‑only: scoring runs as audited dry‑run snapshots, automations run in manual‑review mode, and AI triage analyzes only the text you provide. Your records aren't silently modified or acted on.
Records and structure
What's the difference between a contact and a company? A contact is a person; a company is the account they belong to. One company can have many contacts.
What's the difference between lifecycle stage and pipeline stage? Lifecycle stage describes a relationship (a contact or company being a Lead, Opportunity, or Customer). Pipeline stage describes a single deal's progress (New Lead → Closed Won) or a ticket's progress (New → Resolved).
What's the difference between an activity and a task? An activity logs something that already happened (and can't be edited after logging — delete and re‑log to correct it). A task is something still to do, with a due date and status.
Can a contact belong to more than one company? A contact has one company association. To reflect multiple relationships, use the primary company and capture the rest in activities or notes.
Pipelines and forecasting
Can I change the pipeline stages? StretchCRM ships with a default Sales Pipeline (weighted stages from New Lead to Closed Won) and Support Pipeline (New to Resolved). Pipeline and stage configuration is managed at the administrator/platform level; day‑to‑day you move records through the existing stages.
How is my forecast calculated? Open pipeline value is the raw sum of open deals. A weighted forecast multiplies each deal's amount by its stage's win probability — e.g. a $20,000 deal in Proposal Sent (65%) is ~$13,000 of expected value.
What currency does StretchCRM use? Amounts default to CAD and are stored to the cent.
Sequences, marketing, and automations
What's a sequence? A reusable multi‑step follow‑up (email and task steps over set days) that you enroll a contact or a deal into. Contact sequences take contacts; deal sequences take deals.
Is the marketing area fully live? Sales and service — contacts, companies, deals, tickets, activities, tasks, and sequences — are fully available. Marketing (lists, forms, campaigns) is a foundation that expands as connections like StretchForms are enabled for your organization.
Will automations act on their own? No. Automations run in manual‑review safety mode: they prepare and queue actions for a person to approve, never firing autonomously.
Intelligence and AI
Does lead scoring change my records automatically? No. Scoring produces advisory, audited dry‑run snapshots. You decide what to apply.
What does AI triage do? It reads an inbound message and returns a structured intent, priority, sentiment, summary, next action, and tags. It's read‑only and fails safe when disabled or unavailable.
The rest of the suite
How does StretchCRM connect to other StretchSuite apps? It's designed to draw context from StretchForms (leads from submissions), StretchSupport (tickets and KB coverage), StretchAnalytics (engagement), StretchBooks (invoices/revenue), and StretchMail (communication). Your contacts and companies act as the shared identity layer as those connections light up.
Where do invoices and payments live? Commercial documents connect to StretchBooks; StretchCRM focuses on the relationship, pipeline, and service side.
Tips
- Search contacts by email — it's unique, so it's the most reliable identifier.
- Attach every record to its contact and company so timelines and reporting stay complete.
- Keep lifecycle, owner, and consent accurate — they power nearly every other feature.
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