# Salesforce Kanban view for opportunities: how a sales manager runs a weekly deal review from the board

https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-kanban-view-opportunities-manager-deal-review/
Published: 2026-10-20 · Updated: 2026-10-20

Salesforce’s Kanban view shows opportunities as cards in stage columns, so a manager can see where deals pile up and drag a card to the next stage. It is a good picture of the pipeline for a weekly review, but it hides missing fields and stale activity, so pair it with four questions. The board tells you where a deal is. It does not tell you whether the deal is real, whether anyone is working it, or whether the column total means anything. The questions below are how we get those answers out of the board in about twenty minutes, and the last section is about the point where the board stops being enough.

## What the Salesforce Kanban view shows (and where it isn’t available)

A Kanban view is a list view drawn as columns. You open a list view, pick Kanban from the display menu, and can toggle back to the table any time ( [Salesforce Help: Work in a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.kanban_use.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). For opportunities the default grouping is Stage, and the number at the top of each column is the sum of Amount for the opportunities in it ( [Trailhead: Visualize Success with Path and Kanban](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/leads_opportunities_lightning_experience/visualize-success-with-path-and-kanban)).

Each card carries a handful of fields, and an opportunity card can also carry an alert. Salesforce raises one for three conditions: overdue tasks, no open activities, and no activity in the last 30 days. Hover over the alert and you get a tip on moving the deal ahead, such as creating a task ( [Salesforce Help: Considerations for Using Kanban Views](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5); [Work in a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.kanban_use.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). For a manager those alerts are the most useful thing on the board. They are also easy to scroll past.

What the board leaves out matters as much:

- Lightning Experience only. Salesforce lists the Kanban view for Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited and Developer editions, in Lightning Experience ( [Salesforce Help: Set Up a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.kanban_configuration.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ). A rep still on Classic does not see it.
- The opportunity kanban shows up to 200 records, and Closed Lost opportunities are hidden ( [Considerations for Using Kanban Views](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ). That is the answer to the most common complaint in search, “Kanban view not showing all”: the view is capped, and the losses are gone by design.
- Records with no value in the Group By field do not appear ( [Set Up a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.kanban_configuration.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ).
- No mass actions, and nobody without Edit access to a record can drag its card, so a card that refuses to move in the meeting is usually sharing, not a bug. In a multi-currency org the board shows amounts in your personal currency ( [Considerations for Using Kanban Views](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ).

So the board is a filtered, capped, open-deals-only picture. Fine for a review, as long as everyone in the room knows that.

## Set it up for a review: filter, stage columns, Summarize By

Do not run the review on “All Opportunities” switched to Kanban. On any team of size you will hit the 200-card cap, and you will be looking at other people’s deals. Build one list view per review and save it.

1. Create a list view for the team you review: owner is the rep or the role, Close Date in the quarter you care about, stage not closed. The board shows whatever the list view’s filters let through, so get them right here ( [Trailhead: Visualize Success with Path and Kanban](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/leads_opportunities_lightning_experience/visualize-success-with-path-and-kanban) ).
2. Switch the display to Kanban from the list display dropdown ( [Salesforce Help: Work in a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.kanban_use.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ).
3. Open List View Controls, then Kanban Settings. Leave Group By on Stage. Set Summarize By to a currency or numeric field, or None ( [Salesforce Help: Set Up a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.kanban_configuration.htm&language=en_US&type=5) ). We summarize by Amount for the review and switch to Expected Revenue only when the forecast is the topic, because reps read Expected Revenue as “what Salesforce thinks I will close” and start arguing with the probability instead of the deal.
4. Put the fields you will ask about first in the list view, so they land on the cards: Next Step and Close Date at minimum. Weflow’s walkthrough shows a typical opportunity card with four fields, the same as the first four columns of the table view ( [Weflow: Salesforce Kanban view](https://www.weflow.ai/blog/salesforce-kanban-view) ).

You need Edit on the list view to change its Kanban settings ( [Set Up a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.kanban_configuration.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). If the review view is public, make it yours, or a helpful rep will re-sort it the night before.

![Schematic Kanban board with four numbered callouts: a stale-deal alert, blank card fields, a dragged card, and a column total next to the commit](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/salesforce-kanban-view-opportunities-manager-deal-review-2.png)

## Question 1: which cards sat in a column too long

Start on the right side of the board, not the left. The expensive stale deals are in Proposal and Negotiation, where the amount is large and the rep has already stopped calling.

The card does not show days in stage. What it does show is the alert triangle, and one of its three triggers is no activity in the last 30 days ( [Salesforce Help: Considerations for Using Kanban Views](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). For a weekly review that is your stale marker. Go column by column and ask about every triangle in Proposal or later before anything else. The question to the rep is not “why no activity”. It is “what is the next thing the buyer agreed to do, and when?”

One caveat from the same help page: alerts are not shown when Einstein Activity Capture is enabled and the opportunity has no overdue tasks. If your org uses Activity Capture, the triangles thin out and you lose the 30-day signal. Put Last Activity on the list view so it lands on the card, and read it yourself.

## Question 2: what’s blank on the card?

This is the check the board makes easy, if you did step 4 of the setup. A blank Next Step is visible from across the room. So is a Close Date that has already passed, and that one is worse: the deal still sits in whatever period its date falls in, so any report filtered on close date keeps counting it. Look for the “no open activities” alert on the same cards; nothing scheduled and a date nobody believes tend to come together.

You can fix both without leaving the board: click the down arrow on a card and select Edit, or edit key fields inline in the details panel ( [Trailhead](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/leads_opportunities_lightning_experience/visualize-success-with-path-and-kanban); [Salesforce Help: Work in a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.kanban_use.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). The same two blanks as a filtered list per rep are MGR 1 and MGR 2 in our [list views piece](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-list-views-manager-deal-hygiene/), together with what to do about them.

A disclosure, since this is where tooling comes in. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive, and it works with Salesforce. Its Deal Health checks every open deal against more than 20 rules and explains each violation with a recommended action, so the manager can open the review with a list instead of hunting the board for blanks. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you want that list made for you.

## Question 3: dragging a card without the fields the stage needs

Dragging is the Kanban view’s selling point and the thing we trust least. Drop a card in the next column and its Stage changes. The fields your sales process expects at that stage, the decision criteria, the budget, the competitor, are not put in front of the rep by the drag itself.

We looked for Salesforce’s own documentation of what happens when a card is dropped on a stage with required fields or a validation rule behind it, and did not find it on the Kanban help pages. So do not take our word, or anyone’s blog, for it. Test it in your org: drag one sandbox opportunity into a stage that has a required field empty, and see whether Salesforce stops the move, asks for the field, or lets it through. Write the answer into your review notes, because it decides how much you can trust stage on the board.

The details panel helps here. If your admin set up Path, the key fields and guidance for each stage show in the panel next to the board ( [Work in a Kanban View](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.kanban_use.htm&language=en_US&type=5)); which fields belong on which stage is its own topic, covered in our [Sales Path guide](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-sales-path-guidance-per-stage/).

Until you know, the review question is simple. For every card that moved right since last week, ask the rep to open the record and show the stage fields. If they are blank, the card goes back. Moving a deal back in front of the team feels harsh. It makes the columns mean something, and its the cheapest moment to find out.

## Question 4: column totals versus the forecast

The number on a column header is whatever you put in Summarize By. With Amount, it is the plain sum of Amount for every card in that column, with no weighting for probability or close date. Add the Negotiation and Proposal headers and compare them with the number the rep committed for the quarter. If the late-stage columns hold three times the commit, either the commit is sandbagged or the columns are full of deals nobody believes. Both are worth five minutes.

Two things make the column total lie and both come from Salesforce’s own considerations page. A column that emptied since last week may have emptied into Closed Lost, which you cannot see from here. And with multiple currencies the totals are in your personal currency, so a rep selling in euros and a manager set to dollars are not reading the same header ( [Considerations for Using Kanban Views](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5)).

You also cannot group opportunities by Forecast Category on the board ( [same page](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=kanban_considerations.htm&language=en_US&type=5)). That is the clearest hint Salesforce gives that the board is a stage picture, not a forecast tool.

## When to switch from the board to a report

The board answers “where is each deal and who is ignoring it”. It does not answer “how did the pipeline change” or “what is the whole team’s number”. The moment you find yourself scrolling, counting cards, or asking what was in a column last week, open a report.

That moment comes sooner than people expect. A review view that grows past 200 opportunities gets cut without a warning on the board. Lost deals never make it into the picture. Days in stage, stage history and any comparison with last week live elsewhere, and so does a forecast category view.

For the week-over-week check, the one that catches amounts quietly growing and close dates quietly sliding, we use [a weekly pipeline inspection in Salesforce](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-pipeline-inspection-weekly-review/). For the deeper quarterly pass over data quality, see [how to audit opportunities in Salesforce as a sales manager](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-opportunity-audit-sales-manager/).

Keep the board for what it does well: walking the stages with the team, card by card, with the four questions open. This week, build the review list view, put Next Step and Close Date on the cards, and start the next meeting from the Negotiation column.