The expected close date is what puts a deal in a month. It drives the closing-soon list, the pipeline by period, and every forecast anyone builds from them.

Keeping it honest

• Put in when the customer will decide, not when you would like them to.
• When a date passes, move it and say why in a note — a pipeline full of last month's dates is the clearest sign nobody is maintaining it.
• A deal with no close date sits outside every period report. It is in the pipeline but not in any month.

Month boundaries and timezones

Periods are worked out in your tribe's own timezone, so a deal dated the last day of the month belongs to that month for the tribe that owns it — not to whichever month it happens to be at head office.

Closing a deal

When a deal is won or lost it also gets a closed date — when it actually finished, as opposed to when you thought it would. The gap between the two, across many deals, is the honest measure of how well your team forecasts.