# The sales tracking spreadsheet next to your Pipedrive: what each column is covering for

https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-tracking-spreadsheet-pipedrive/
Published: 2026-10-05 · Updated: 2026-10-05

A sales tracking spreadsheet that runs next to Pipedrive is usually answering a question Pipedrive was not set up to answer. List its columns, and for each one decide whether it becomes a custom field, a saved filter or an Insights report. When every column has a home, the spreadsheet can stop.

If you came here for a template, this isn’t one. It’s for the team that already has Pipedrive and still has the sheet.

## Why the spreadsheet is still there

Most of what ranks for this topic is templates, and the better ones are honest about where they fit. [SpreadsheetPoint’s sales tracker page](https://spreadsheetpoint.com/templates/sales-tracker-spreadsheet-for-google-sheets-and-excel/) says it plainly: “Some teams use both: the CRM for activity tracking and the spreadsheet for pipeline review in weekly team meetings.” That is the setup this article is about, and we think it costs more than it looks.

Picture a team that has been on Pipedrive for a year. Reps log deals in it. The manager pays for it. And there is still a Google Sheet called something like “Pipeline Q4 (real)” that gets updated on Friday afternoon, by hand, by the manager.

When we look at a sheet like that it is held up by one of three things.

A report nobody has built. The manager wants weighted value per rep per month, or deals that moved stage this week, and has never opened Insights long enough to find out whether that report exists. So the sheet does the maths.

A field that does not exist. “Competitor”, “Why lost”, “Decision date confirmed?”. The rep learns it on a call, there is no box for it in the deal, so it goes into a column.

Distrust. The manager does not believe the stage or the close date in Pipedrive, so they keep a private copy where they correct both by hand. This is the one to take seriously, because here the sheet is not the problem. Its the symptom. If the real reason is that reps don’t update deals, that is a different article: [why sales teams quietly stop using the CRM](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-adoption/).

Whichever of the three it is, the fix starts the same way: with a list.

## Inventory: every column in your sales tracking spreadsheet

Open the sheet. Write every column header down in a new tab, and next to each one the question the manager is answering when they look at it. Not what the column contains, what it is for.

Deal, Rep, Stage and Value are already in Pipedrive, so they need nothing. “Competitor” and “Why lost” are facts about a deal that have no box yet: those become custom fields. “Last contact” and “Days in stage” are really yes/no questions about data Pipedrive already holds, which makes them saved filters. “Total per rep this month” is a sum, and sums are reports. And “Manager confidence (1 to 5)” plus the colour of the row are opinions, which get deleted.

![Map of spreadsheet column types to Pipedrive: custom field, saved filter, Insights report, or delete](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/sales-tracking-spreadsheet-pipedrive-2.png)

That’s the pattern you’ll see in almost every sheet: columns that duplicate Pipedrive, columns that are a missing field, columns that are a view, columns that are a sum. Plus the group managers argue about, the opinions. The next four sections take them in turn.

## Column → custom field

A column becomes a custom field when three things are true. It is a fact about the deal, not a judgment about it. A rep can fill it in at the moment they learn it. And somebody will filter or report on it later. “Competitor” passes all three. “Manager confidence” fails the first.

In Pipedrive you add one from the account menu, Personal preferences > Data fields, then + Custom field on the deal entity ( [Pipedrive: custom fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/custom-fields)). The same help page describes two ways to make sure it gets filled. A required field blocks saving the deal until the value is there. An important field highlights the gap in the deal view and blocks nothing. Check your plan before you design around either: the help page lists important fields under the Growth plan and required fields under Premium. Which one to use, and why we think most fields should be important rather than required, is in [required fields in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/required-fields-pipedrive/).

A warning from experience. The spreadsheet had nine columns because columns are free. Fields are not free: every field is a question a rep has to answer on every deal, and the ones nobody fills become noise that hides the ones that matter. Move the two or three columns that earn it, and read [how to clean up Pipedrive custom fields](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-custom-fields-cleanup-data-fields/) before you add a fourth.

If the sheet already holds values for existing deals, don’t retype them. Pipedrive imports straight from a spreadsheet ( [Pipedrive: importing data with spreadsheets](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/importing-data-into-pipedrive-with-spreadsheets)), and the part people get wrong, matching rows to deals that already exist, is in [updating Pipedrive records from a spreadsheet by ID](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-update-records-spreadsheet-system-id/).

## Column → saved filter

Look at “Last contact”. The manager does not care about the date. They care about the deals where the date is more than two weeks old. That column is a yes/no computed from data Pipedrive already has, and a yes/no like that is a filter, not a field.

Same with “Days in stage”, “No next step” and “Close date in the past”. Each is one condition, or two, on fields already on the deal.

Build each one from the filter drop-down in the deals list or pipeline view and save it as shared, not private ( [Pipedrive: filtering](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/filtering)), because the spreadsheet was shared too. Getting the list columns to show what the sheet showed is covered in [shared filters and saved columns in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-shared-filters-saved-columns/).

One filter per former column. Name it after the question, not the condition: “Quiet for two weeks”, not “Last activity < today minus 14”.

## Column → Insights report

Sums, rates and averages don’t belong in fields or filters. “Total per rep this month”, “Won vs lost this quarter”, “Average days from proposal to close”: those are reports, and Pipedrive’s Insights covers that spreadsheet maths with its deal performance, conversion, duration and progress reports ( [Pipedrive: Insights report types](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-report-types)). Which ones a manager actually needs for a weekly review is in [Pipedrive reports for pipeline health](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-reports-pipeline-health/).

Two places where the standard reports stop.

First, a report can only cut by a field that exists. If the sheet sums value by competitor, the Competitor field from the earlier section has to come first, and it has to be filled on past deals, not only new ones. Then there’s the plan question. Pipedrive’s help says only Premium and higher plans can use custom fields for filtering and building reports in the visual builder, while every plan can use them in the table view ( [Pipedrive: Insights](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-feature)). On a lower plan the table view is the honest answer, and it still beats a sheet one person updates by hand.

Second, the sheet often multiplies a Pipedrive number by a number that isn’t in Pipedrive. “Value times manager confidence” is the classic. No report will reproduce it, because confidence is not a field, and we’d argue it shouldn’t become one. Which brings us to the columns that go.

## The columns you should just delete

Managers push back on this section, so here is our position with the reason.

“Manager confidence”, “Real?”, “My forecast” and the row colour all encode the same thing: the manager does not believe the stage. A deal in Proposal Sent with confidence 1 is not a Proposal Sent deal with a note. It is a deal in the wrong stage. The honest fix is to move it back, or to agree what Proposal Sent actually requires, so a rep can’t put a deal there before the proposal is out. A confidence column lets the stage stay wrong forever, because the manager has a private correction and no reason to raise it in the pipeline meeting.

Moving a deal back feels harsh. It is cheaper than a second pipeline.

Delete these columns before the parallel run below, not after. If they stay, the manager will keep opening the the sheet for them, and a sheet that gets opened is a sheet that gets updated.

## How to switch the spreadsheet off

Every column now has a home or a reason to go. Don’t simply stop updating the sheet; a sheet that dies quietly comes back quietly. Give it an ending.

1. Pick the date the sheet goes read-only and say it out loud at the pipeline meeting. Two weeks out is usually enough.
2. For those two weeks, run both. The manager keeps updating the sheet exactly as before, and Pipedrive carries the new fields, the shared filters and the dashboard.
3. Every time the manager changes a cell in the sheet, mark the row. On Friday, open those marked deals in Pipedrive. Each one is a place where the manager knew something Pipedrive didn’t.
4. For each marked deal, ask why Pipedrive didn’t have it. The field wasn’t filled, the filter condition was off, the report cut by the wrong date, the stage was wrong. Fix that cause in Pipedrive, not the sheet.
5. On the date, make the sheet read-only. Keep it a month in case someone needs an old number, then archive it.

![Two-week timeline for switching off a sales spreadsheet next to Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/sales-tracking-spreadsheet-pipedrive-3.png)

The marked rows are the part that matters. Random checks tell you how clean the data is on average; the manager’s own edits tell you exactly where they still don’t trust Pipedrive, and why. If the list of marked rows shrinks from the first Friday to the second, the distrust from the first section is being fixed. If it doesn’t, you’ve found the field or the stage definition that is still broken.

At the first meeting after the date, the sentence to say is short: “The sheet is closed. If a question isn’t answered in Pipedrive, tell me which one and we build it there.”

## Where SalesBond fits

A disclosure, since the last column we deleted was the manager’s own quality check: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. The confidence column existed because somebody had to read every deal and decide whether it was real. Deal Health does that reading with rules instead of a gut number. More than 20 of them, grouped into activity, progression, data, ownership and forecast, check every deal in the CRM, show which rules each deal breaks and recommend what to do about each one. It replaces the column, not the conversation. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you want to see what the rules find before your first Friday does.