The right rail is everything the deal is connected to, and increasingly it is where the work happens rather than a list of links.
Four sections
Associations. The organisation and the contacts.
Documents. Contracts, invoices and files.
Activity. Tasks.
Tools. Including a generated deal brief.
Associations
The organisation is the company buying. One deal, one buying entity.
Contacts are the people. Plural, deliberately: a deal with one contact is a deal that dies when that person changes jobs, and the rail says so with an empty state rather than leaving you to notice.
Link the company early. A deal with no organisation is invisible on the account, so nobody looking at the customer sees it, and it is the single most common data problem in any CRM. If your organisation has a lot of them, data management finds them in bulk.
Add the second contact before you need it. The moment to find the finance contact is not the week the invoice is disputed.
Documents
Contracts. Generated from the deal and sent for signature. The rail is the only contracts surface: an earlier separate tab was retired, so everything happens here. Sending and signing are covered in Sending a document.
Invoices. Raised against the deal, so what was sold and what was billed stay connected. The empty state says it plainly: create one once the contract is signed. See Invoices and AR.
Files. Anything else. Specifications, references, whatever was exchanged.
The rail does the work, not just the linking
The part people miss, and it is what makes the deal record worth staying on.
Contracts, quotations, products, payments and files each open inside the rail. You are not navigated somewhere else and you do not lose the deal.
Build a quotation without leaving. Add products, price them, and it stays attached.
Generate a contract from the deal, filled from what is already on the record rather than retyped.
Record a payment against the invoice.
That matters because the alternative is what most systems do: send you to a separate module, where you rebuild the context by hand and frequently forget to link it back.
Tasks
What is outstanding on this deal.
One next step, always. A deal with no task is one nothing is scheduled to happen on, whatever the stage says. That is the most reliable signal of a deal about to go quiet, and it is visible from the left panel too.
Products and quoting
A quotation is built in the rail: add the products, price them, and it stays attached to the deal.
Quote from the catalogue rather than typing. Prices, descriptions and codes come from one place, so a quote does not quietly disagree with an invoice raised three weeks later. See The catalogue.
The quotation is what the contract fills from. Getting it right once means the contract and the invoice are both right without retyping, which is the whole point of the sequence.
The deal brief
The rail can generate a brief from the record: what the deal is, who is involved, what has happened, where it stands.
Use it before a call, particularly one on a deal you have not touched in weeks, and particularly one you have inherited. It reads the whole record faster than you can.
Read it, do not send it. It is a summary for you, drawn from your own notes, and it inherits whatever is wrong in them. It is also written for an internal reader.
It is only as good as the timeline. A brief from a record with three empty notes tells you three empty notes. That is not a fault in the brief; it is the timeline telling you something.
The empty states are the checklist
Each section says what is missing rather than showing a blank box, and read together they are the most honest health check on any deal.
No organisation. No contacts. No contracts. No invoices. No tasks.
A deal showing four empty states is not a deal, whatever the stage claims. It is an opportunity somebody entered and did not work. Scanning the rail is a five-second version of the review that would otherwise take a meeting.
Nothing here is optional bookkeeping
Every section in the rail is something a deal genuinely needs to become revenue. An empty one is not a tidy record; it is a step that has not happened.
Collapsing it
The rail closes, and so does the left panel.
Close the rail when you are reading the history. Open it when you are progressing the deal: quoting, contracting, invoicing.
Most people never discover this and work in three cramped columns permanently.
The order things happen in
The rail is arranged roughly in the order a deal progresses, and following it is the fastest path.
Organisation and contacts first, so the deal is attached to somebody.
Quotation once you know what you are selling.
Contract from the quotation.
Invoice once the contract is signed.
Payment against the invoice.
Skipping a step is usually possible and usually costs you later: an invoice with no contract behind it is the one that gets disputed, and a contract with no quotation behind it is the one with the wrong price.
Files, and where they belong
Anything exchanged can be attached here, and most of it should be.
Attach the version you sent. Not the working copy. What the customer actually received is the thing that matters in a dispute, and it is the thing nobody can reconstruct later.
Use Documents for anything signed. A signed agreement belongs where signatures are captured and provable rather than as a file. See Documents.
Two habits
Attach everything to the deal, not to the person. A file on the contact is findable by whoever remembers the contact. On the deal it is findable by anybody looking at the deal, which includes the person covering for you.
Work the rail top to bottom on a stalled deal. Organisation, contacts, contracts, invoices, tasks. The gap is almost always the reason.
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