Every Friday afternoon, someone at our client's office would open Pipedrive, export a spreadsheet, paste figures into a formatted Excel template, fix the formulas, and email the result to the management team.
It took the entire day to produce the report as it was highly complex. If the person who knew how to do it was on leave, the report didn't go out. If they made a mistake in the copy-paste, nobody noticed until a manager queried a figure in the meeting.
The report itself was fine. It showed everything management needed — deals quoted and won that week, GP and overhead recovery per deal, Business Unit breakdown, pipeline health at a glance. The problem was entirely in how it was produced.
What we replaced it with
A hosted web app connected directly to Pipedrive via API.
The management team log in online and the report is always there — live data pulled straight from Pipedrive, no exports, no manual steps. Every Friday it lands in their inbox automatically. If someone needs it mid-week, they can generate and download it on demand at any time.
The report covers four sections — Orders, Quotes, Requotes, Variations — each with colour-coded Business Unit columns, GP and overhead figures, and subtotals. Monthly and weekly views are both available.
The categorisation problem
The trickiest part wasn't building the report. It was encoding the categorisation logic that previously lived only in the spreadsheet author's head.
Deals are sorted into four groups automatically:
- Orders — Status = Won (any pipeline)
- Quotes — open deals, not in Variations, with title suffix
/0 - Requotes — open deals, not in Variations, with title suffix
/1or higher - Variations — any deal in a pipeline containing "variation"
The key insight was detecting Quotes vs Requotes from the version number already in the deal title. The client's team names deals consistently: QT-50401/0, QT-50401/1, QT-50401/2. The tool just parses that suffix. No custom Pipedrive fields needed, no change to how the team works.
Why not just use a dashboard tool?
The categorisation logic is bespoke. The Business Unit column layout is specific to how this client structures their pipeline. The GP and overhead recovery figures come from custom Pipedrive fields. Getting any off-the-shelf tool to reproduce this layout exactly would have required more configuration than building it from scratch — and the result would have been dependent on a third-party subscription.
A bespoke tool built around how the client already works, connected directly to their Pipedrive data, is simpler and more durable than a general-purpose one configured to approximate it.
The result
No more entire days spent creating spreadsheets. The report goes out automatically, it's always based on live data, and anyone on the team can pull it whenever they need it.
If you've got a report that works well but costs someone a day a week to produce, get in touch — this is exactly the kind of thing we enjoy fixing.