Opportunities Explained
An Opportunity is a time-boxed hold on a lead, not a separate object you browse in a list of its own — internally it's called a "reservation," always tied to exactly one lead.
One live claim per lead, with a full history
A lead can only have one active Opportunity at a time — either Pending (awaiting approval) or Reserved (approved and running). But over its life, a lead can accumulate a history of Opportunities: a prior request that was denied or expired doesn't block a new request being made later. Nothing about a denied or expired Opportunity is deleted — it stays visible in that lead's history.
Two separate commission concepts
An Opportunity records two distinct things about commission, easy to confuse:
- Overall commission on the sale — a single figure (percent or fixed amount, one-time or recurring) representing what the organization pays out overall for this sale. It defaults from the lead's market default commission if the requesting agent doesn't set one.
- Commission splits — separate from the above, a list of named colleagues each carved a percent or fixed share out of that overall figure, one-time or recurring per colleague. Both the requester and the approver can add, edit, or remove these before approval.
What approval does — and doesn't — do
Approving an Opportunity does not turn it into a separate "Deal" or "Sale" record, and it does not automatically pay anyone. It simply marks the reservation Reserved and locks in the agreed commission window and figures as a record of what was agreed. Actually issuing a commission payout is a separate, manual step an administrator performs elsewhere (commission processing, outside this CRM area) — there's no automatic path from an approved Opportunity into a payout. Don't assume commission gets paid just because a reservation was approved.
Every state change — requested, approved, denied, extended, expired, closed, or an edited commission split — is logged to that Opportunity's history, viewable from the reservation.
There's also a personal, read-only view under a member's own account settings (Commissions → Opportunities) showing just their own held opportunities and commission shares — separate from the admin-facing Reserved Opportunities screen described in How do I approve or deny an opportunity reservation?
