Opportunities: the Deal Hub

You opened an "Opportunity" in REDA and found a lease — not a sales pipeline card. That's not a mistake. In REDA, one Opportunity object is the deal record for every line of business: the lease itself, the acquisition worksheet, the loan, the sale settlement, and the property-management agreement. Which one you're looking at depends on the record's type. This article explains that single idea, shows you how to read the Stage field correctly for each line, introduces the discipline of letting tickets drive the stage, and tells you which numbers on the record are informational and which are operational. No prior REDA experience is assumed.

One object, five businesses

The single most important thing to grasp is this: the Opportunity is the deal. For a lease, the Opportunity carries the lease dates, term, tenant account, late-fee and month-to-month settings, and it anchors billing — it isn't a card that tracks a lease elsewhere, it is the lease. The same record shape serves an acquisition (as a buying worksheet), a loan (as the loan record), a sale (as a settlement statement), and a managed property (as the management agreement). It carries familiar headline fields — Amount, Close Date, Forecast Category, Next Step — but on a REDA deal those are informational; the operational money lives elsewhere (see below). Unlike inquiries, deals are visible across your organization.

The five deal types

The record type is the line of business. Five are active; a sixth ships switched off.

How Stage works

Every deal advances through a Stage, shown as a Path across the top of the record. Behind the scenes there is a single shared list of 32 stage values, but no deal shows you all of them — each type has its own subset, which is why a lease and a loan show completely different Paths. Read the Stage in the context of its type:

Leasing is the one to watch: its ladder is a lease lifecycle, not a sales funnel. Occupied - No Notice isn't a step toward a win — it's the healthy steady state of a tenant living in the unit with no notice to leave on file. Lending reads oddly too: Payoff Pending comes after Closed Won — a loan is "won" once it's funded and closed, then it sits in Payoff Pending while the borrower works down the principal, so a healthy live loan can rest past Closed Won for years.

Stages the system sets — don't fight the automation

Many stage transitions aren't set by hand — they're written when you close a ticket (REDA's tracked checklist for a step in a record's life). Complete the ticket and the stage follows. Here's who sets what:

The early stages — Application - New to Completed, the Denied and Cancelled decisions, and the opening stages of the other lines (Prospecting, Qualification, Property Selection, Binder, Inspection, Offering, and the whole Lending ladder) — are yours to set by hand. But once a deal reaches a ticket-owned stage, editing the Stage directly fights the automation: the ticket may overwrite it, a guard may block it, or downstream steps may misfire.

Some stages you can set by hand still won't budge until the record carries the figure that stage implies. On a Property Sale, for instance, you can't advance the stage without a sale price on the record — "You must provide the value of Sale / Purchase Price prior updating the stage." — and the same deal blocks the move without its under-contract date: "You must provide the value of Under Contract Date prior updating the stage." These aren't ticket-driven; they're guards that make sure the deal's numbers keep pace with its stage.

System flags derived from Stage

A handful of read-only indicators are recalculated from the Stage every time the deal is saved — think of them as traffic lights, not switches. Closed, Won, Active, and Accounting Active (billing) all follow the stage: a lease is "won" once it's occupied, and billing runs only while the lease sits in an Occupied stage. You read these; you don't edit them.

Anatomy of a deal record

A leasing deal's record page carries these tabs: Activity · Details · Child Leases · Tickets · Service Requests · Accounting (with Active and Inactive sub-tabs) · Charge Setup · Bookings · Visitor Logs · Commissions · Notes & Files · Audit Trail, with the Path on Stage across the header. Other deal types show the blocks that fit their business on their own record page.

On money, one distinction saves confusion. The Amount field is a headline figure — informational only. The operational numbers are the chargebook and invoice rollups: the Total Charge Amount, the outstanding invoice and batch balances, and the collections headline, Net Invoice(s) Balance (a negative value means the tenant has overpaid). When you want to know what a tenant actually owes, read the invoice balances, not Amount. For how billing itself works, see How Billing Works.

The record's name is built for you and can't be typed directly — for a lease it combines the primary contact and the property; for a sale, the property name; for a loan, the account.

Parent & child deals

Some deals nest. A co-living lease or a parking add-on hangs as a child lease under a parent lease; a loan can carry child loans. The rule is one level deep — a child cannot itself be a parent: "Parent Lease must not be associated to a Parent Opportunity". Two consistency guards keep the family sensible: a child must share the parent's account — "Invalid Account. Account must be the same as on Parent Opportunity." — but must cover a different property — "Property cannot be same as on Parent Opportunity." — since a parking child, say, covers a different unit than the apartment. When sync is switched on, a parent lease pushes its stage, approval, and renewal to its children; see Child Leases.

Approval & locking

A leasing deal carries an Approval Status that runs Draft (the default) → Submitted → Approved (or Rejected). Two rules gate it. You can't jump the Stage to Application - Approved without submitting first — "Submit the leasing application for approval prior to updating stage to "Application - Approved"." — and you can't approve a lease with no charges — "Leasing Opportunity can not be approved if Opportunity Charges are not provided. If Leasing Opportunity has child leases, then Opportunity Charges on the child leases must be provided as well." Once approved, the lease locks its key fields; editing the property, dates, or term afterward brings up "The leasing record is approved and locked for editing."

Worked example: reading one lease

Follow Aisha Rahman's lease through its stages. It's born at Application - New from conversion. The agent adds the charges and sets Application - Completed, then submits and approves it — Application - Approved — at which point REDA creates the Lease Agreement ticket. The ticket goes out, moving the lease to Agreement - In Process; the contract is signed and the lease reaches Occupied - Pending Move In, where billing switches on and a Move In ticket appears. On move-in day, closing that ticket advances the lease to Occupied - No Notice — a healthy tenancy. Throughout, rent runs at 1,200.00 per month, tracked in the invoice balances rather than in Amount. Nobody dragged the Path through the occupancy stages; the tickets wrote them.

The Opportunities list in the REDA app — each deal shows its Record Type, Account, Property, Property Type, Stage and Close Date, with leasing deals sitting at stages from Application - New through Occupied.

A Leasing deal record — the Stage Path runs across the top from Application through Occupied to Expired, above the Ledger Summary band, the Related List Quick Links, the Contact Roles list, and the record's tabs (Activity, Details, Child Leases, Tickets, Service Requests, Accounting and more).

The deal's Tickets tab, showing the auto-created Lease Agreement ticket among the tickets that drive the stages, each with its Record Type and Status.

Reference: stage defaults per type

Where to go next

1. Converting an Inquiry — how a deal is born from a qualified inquiry.
2. From Application to Move-In — the leasing lifecycle in full.
3. Understanding Tickets — the engine that moves the stages.
4. How Billing Works — why Amount isn't the bill.
5. Child Leases — how co-living and multi-unit deals nest.

Frequently asked questions