Deal tracking software is bought when a desk stops trusting its own spreadsheet, and the buying decision is almost always framed as a feature comparison when the thing that actually decides the outcome is how long it takes an analyst to record what happened on a Tuesday afternoon. If that is fifteen seconds it happens every time. If it is a form with fourteen fields it happens for three weeks and then stops, and by the second month the record is fiction that a partner is reading as fact. This page sets out what has to be recorded, what can be dropped, and what dropping it costs.
Four fields survive a bad week
Tier, NDA state, last contact and a one-line note. That is the set an analyst will keep current on the week a process is going badly, which is exactly the week the record matters most. Every field beyond those four is a field that gets skipped under pressure, and a partly-filled record is worse than an empty one because somebody will read it as complete. Design for the bad week and the good weeks look after themselves.
The mandate has a stage and so does every buyer
These are two different things and collapsing them into one field is the most common reason a tracker stops being believed. The mandate is at materials, or in market, or in diligence. Each buyer on it is separately at approached, NDA out, NDA back, IOI in or dead. A system with one stage field forces the analyst to pick which truth to record, and whichever they pick, the other question becomes unanswerable without a phone call.
Dates matter more than states
When a buyer went quiet is more useful than the fact that they did. A last-contact date turns a dead list into a re-approach list, and a re-approach list is where the second bite at a stalled process comes from. It is also the only honest way to answer the partner question about whether a process is slipping: the states look the same in week four and week eleven, and the dates do not.
Keep the history, not just the current state
What the deal looked like a month ago is the difference between a record and a snapshot. Without it there is no way to tell whether a process is moving slowly or has stopped, because the only comparison available is your own memory of how you felt about it last month, and that memory is systematically optimistic about deals you are close to.
Questions people ask about deal tracking software
How much detail should we record per buyer?
Tier, NDA state, last contact and a note. Everything past that gets skipped when the desk is busy, which is when the record matters.
Does deal tracking software replace the data room?
No. A mandate has a data room and this is not one. The tracker holds who is in the room and what stage they reached, not the documents.
What does it cost?
The three worksheets on this site are free forever. Keeping a mandate as a record is $69 a month for the whole desk rather than per seat.