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:

1. 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.
2. 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?