Introduction to pipeline rules
Pipeline rules in BoldSales help bring structure to how opportunities move through a pipeline. As sales teams grow, maintaining consistency across opportunities (pipeline records) becomes increasingly important. Without clear guardrails, opportunities can move forward with missing information, or inconsistent stages, making pipelines harder to trust and manage.
At a high level, pipeline rules define what must be in place before an opportunity can progress. They ensure that critical information is captured at the right time, without forcing sales teams to change how they sell.
Why pipeline rules matter
Pipeline rules address several common challenges faced by sales teams, including:
- Opportunities moving forward without required or complete details
- Inconsistent use of pipeline stages across team members
- Reduced visibility caused by incomplete opportunity data
- Attachment of irrelevant or incorrect documents to opportunities
By applying simple, purpose driven rules, BoldSales helps teams maintain pipelines that are clean, consistent, and reliable.
Accessing pipeline rules
Note for non-admin users: If you don’t have access to configure or manage module and fields for Pipelines, contact your BoldSales administrator to request the required permission.
Note for administrators: For managing permissions, refer to Managing User Permissions (Permission Set).
You can access pipeline rules from the pipeline settings.
Follow these steps:
- Go to Setup > Modules and Fields > Pipelines or Setup > Process Management > Pipeline Rules (choose a specific pipeline) or in the search bar, type Pipeline Rules, then select it from the results and choose the pipeline you want to configure.
- Open the Pipeline Rules tab. From here, you can view, create, and manage all pipeline rules associated with the selected pipeline.
Types of pipeline rules in BoldSales
BoldSales right now supports 3 different types of pipeline rules to help teams maintain consistency and ensure that important records stay connected as opportunities move through a pipeline.
- General Association Rules
- Stage Transition Rules
- Stage-Based Association Rules
Each rule type serves a specific purpose and can be enabled based on how structured your sales process needs to be.
General Association Rules
The following table provides a detailed explanation of General Association Rules:
| Purpose | General Association Rules in BoldSales are designed to prevent data pollution within pipelines by controlling what kinds of records, tasks, and documents can be associated or generated. These rules do not force users to add associations. Instead, they restrict invalid or irrelevant associations, ensuring pipelines remain clean, meaningful, and easy to manage, especially in complex or multi-pipeline setups. |
|---|---|
| What General Association Rules Do | These rules define association boundaries for a pipeline. They help ensure that only relevant pipelines, document types, or task types are linked or generated in the context of an opportunity. They help answer: • Which pipelines can be linked? • Which document types are allowed? • Which task types make sense for this pipeline? |
| Why They Matter | Without association rules: • Opportunities may link to unrelated pipelines • Incorrect documents may be generated • Pipelines become cluttered • Reporting accuracy and visibility suffer These rules keep pipelines clean, accurate, and context-appropriate. |
Stage Transition Rules
The following table provides a detailed explanation of Stage Transition Rules in BoldSales:
| Purpose | Stage Transition Rules in BoldSales are designed to enforce disciplined and consistent movement of opportunities through pipeline stages. They control how opportunities progress between stages, ensuring that pipeline status accurately reflects real sales progress rather than skipped steps or casual reversals. Unlike association rules, these rules focus purely on stage movement behavior. |
|---|---|
| What Stage Transition Rules Do | These rules define how opportunities are allowed to move within a pipeline. They help ensure that opportunities follow a logical and consistent stage sequence and answer questions such as: • Can users skip intermediate stages? • Can opportunities move backward once progress is made? By controlling stage progression, these rules keep pipelines orderly and meaningful. |
| Why They Matter | Without stage transition rules: • Opportunities may jump ahead without completing required stages • Opportunities may move backward frequently, creating confusion • Pipeline views may become unreliable for forecasting or reviews Stage Transition Rules ensure that pipeline progression represents actual sales momentum, maintaining clarity, integrity, and trust in pipeline data. |
Available Stage Transition Rules in BoldSales
BoldSales provides two configurable stage transition rules to maintain a consistent and accurate pipeline flow. These rules help ensure that opportunities progress in a structured manner and that forecasting remains reliable.
Restrict skipping stages
Prevents users from moving an opportunity to a later stage without completing the earlier ones.
Ensures: Consistent process and accurate stage progression.
Examples:
- Must follow the order (Qualification → Proposal → Negotiation).
- Mandatory approval stages cannot be bypassed.
- Useful for pipelines with required checkpoints.
Restrict moving backwards
Prevents users from reverting an opportunity to an earlier stage (except to Closed – Lost).
Ensures: Clean stage history and stable forecasting.
Examples:
- Cannot move from Negotiation back to Proposal.
- Progress stays fixed unless marked Lost.
- Suitable for forecasting driven pipelines.
Note: Use the toggle button next to each rule to enable or disable it as needed.
Stage-Based Association Rules
Stage-Based Association Rules in BoldSales restrict stage movement until associated records, tasks, or documents meet specific conditions.
These rules ensure that related work reaches an expected state before an opportunity can progress further in the pipeline.
The following table gives a summarized description of Stage-Based Association Rules:
| Purpose | Stage-Based Association Rules in BoldSales are designed to control opportunity stage progression based on the state of related records, tasks, or documents. They ensure that required work is completed before an opportunity can advance, making stage movement reflect real readiness rather than assumptions. |
|---|---|
| What Stage-Based Association Rules Do | These rules act as conditional checkpoints within a pipeline. An opportunity cannot move to or beyond a defined stage unless specific conditions are met, such as: • Associated records reaching a required stage • Associated tasks reaching a required status • Associated documents reaching a required status • A defined number of associated items existing (exactly or within a range) This enforces dependencies across pipelines and workflows. |
| Why They Matter | Without stage-based controls, opportunities may advance prematurely, skip critical steps, or misrepresent readiness to close. These rules ensure stage progression reflects actual completion, improve cross-team accountability, and maintain operational discipline especially in structured or enterprise environments. |
Types of Stage-Based Association Rules
Pipeline association rule
You can restrict stage movement based on:
- The stage of an associated record in another pipeline
- Optional filtering using labels
- The number of records of specified types associated with.
For example, When the opportunity stage is at least Closed won, the associated record in the Customer Onboarding pipeline must be at or beyond the Welcome call completed stage.
Task association rule
You can restrict stage movement based on:
- Task type
- Task status
- Number of associated tasks
Examples: - When the stage is at least Closed won, all associated To-do tasks must be in Completed status.
- When the stage is at least Need Analysis, the number of associated Intro Call tasks must be between 1 and 3.
Sales documents association rule
You can restrict stage movement based on:
- Document type
- Document status
- Number of documents associated
Example
- When the stage is at least Contract Sent, the associated document of type Service Agreement must be at or beyond the Signed status.
Common use cases
Stage-Based Association Rules are commonly used to:
- Ensure legal or compliance steps are completed
- Prevent premature opportunity closure
- Enforce cross-pipeline dependencies
- Maintain operational discipline in enterprise workflows.
When to use stage-based association rules
These rules are best suited for:
- Structured or enterprise sales processes
- Pipelines with external dependencies (Legal, Finance, Onboarding)
- Teams where stage movement represents a firm commitment
- For highly flexible or early-stage teams, these rules can be introduced gradually.
Using general association and stage-based association rules together
The general association rule restricts the association of specific pipeline, sales document, and task from being associated with the pipeline record.
But, when creating the stage-based association rules, even the items filtered in the general association rule can be used. But these will be ignored when an opportunity is updated from one stage to another.
For instance, consider an opportunity in Deals pipeline which have a general association rule set to restrict the association of Invoice with it. But we have created a stage-based association involving the sales document Invoice. In this case, the stage-based association rule will be ignored.
Important notes for pipeline rules
- Pipeline rules do not apply to admins. Admins have full access and are not restricted by these limits.
- Pipeline rules do not make fields mandatory. To require specific fields at certain stages, use field-level conditional logic in field settings. For more details, refer to Understanding conditional logic in fields
- These rules apply at the pipeline level, and not at the user level.
