Lead to prospect to client

In NetSuite’s process a lead, a prospect and a client are all the same client record. The record is “promoted” through the versions either manually or by virtue of the transactions recorded against it.

In the our current process a record is not created until quote stage (this could be a prospect record in the NS workflow but we go straight to client). A client is always created by finance using information submitted by the sales team in a word document to ensure record completeness and deduplication.

The issue therefore is that for sales team to enter quoted and pre-quote company records (leads and prospects) we must bypass the current manual method of record validation. Any use of the quote/pre-quote elements will generate a client record and there is no concept of a record held or pending approval. We could add a custom field to emulate this but we would need to add a filter on that field to all reports etc...