Agenda and events: track your sales team's activity in Dolibarr

What disappears with a personal diary

A salesperson notes a meeting in their phone, a follow-up call in a notebook, a promise to a customer in an email. As long as they are around, it all works. The day they go on leave, fall ill or leave the company, nobody knows which customer is waiting for an answer or what was promised. The manager finds out when the customer calls to complain. The cost is real: a forgotten follow-up, a quote left idle, a contact you have to rebuild from scratch. The problem is not individual discipline. It comes from where the information is stored. Dolibarr offers an agenda and events attached to third parties, contacts and sales documents. The history then stays in the customer record, not with the person who created it. This guide explains that principle, with a simple method so the whole team sticks to it without spending their days on it.

The principle: an event attached to a third party

In Dolibarr, an agenda event represents an action: meeting, call, email, follow-up, visit. It has a type, a date, an optional duration, a responsible user and free text. Its real value lies in what it is attached to. Linked to a third party, it appears in the events tab of the customer record. Linked to a contact, a project, a quote or an order, it also shows on those objects. When a colleague opens the record, they read the full timeline of exchanges without asking anyone. Dolibarr also creates some events automatically: validating a quote or sending a document by email can leave a trace, depending on how the agenda module is configured. You get an activity log that partly fills itself. Events entered by hand complete this log for what the system cannot see: a phone call, a visit, an informal discussion.

Set common entry rules

The tool is not enough. The team must agree on what goes into it. Start by defining a small number of event types and keep them stable. Too many types make entry tedious and filters useless. Then set when to enter events: ideally right after the call or meeting, with two lines of notes and the next step with a date. That next step matters more than the rest, because it feeds the follow-up. Here are the minimum rules to write down and display for the team.

• Every exchange with a customer or prospect produces an event attached to the right third party, and to the right contact when known.
• Every event ends with a next action and a date, otherwise it is not considered closed.
• Event types are limited to a short list approved by the sales manager.
• Notes are factual: what was said, what was promised, what remains to be done.
• The user responsible for the event is the one who acts, not the one who enters it.

Read the whole team's activity

Once events are entered, the Dolibarr agenda view lets you display actions by user, by type or by period, in month, week or list view. The sales manager filters on one team member to prepare a one-to-one, or removes the filter to see everyone's week. The list helps you spot overdue events: a planned action whose date has passed and that is not marked as done points to a forgotten follow-up. Do this check at a fixed time, for example at the start of the weekly sales meeting. The same reasoning applies on the customer side: open the record of an important account and read the timeline. You see who contacted whom, when, and what was decided. For this kind of regular review, a dashboard can also show the agenda among other indicators, which the free module DolicraftDashboard covers.

Link events, quotes and pipeline

The agenda makes the most sense when it follows the sales cycle. A quote that is sent should trigger a dated follow-up event, attached to the quote itself. A discovery meeting leads to an opportunity, which keeps its events in its history. When a colleague takes over the file, they understand where the discussion stands without rereading a mailbox. If your team works with structured sales stages, the agenda is the fuel: each stage change comes with a tracked action. Our article on the sales pipeline in Dolibarr details this stage-based organisation. Keep one simple idea in mind: a quote with no future event attached is a quote nobody is following. Check this regularly on the list of open proposals, and schedule an action right away for each one that has none.

Plan the handover when a salesperson is away

Absence is the real test of your organisation. Before leave, the salesperson filters their upcoming events and reassigns them to a colleague by changing the responsible user. Notes already entered stay readable, so the replacement knows what to say on the phone. When someone leaves, the logic is the same, with a review of the third parties they were responsible for. The gain is measured in what you no longer lose: commitments made, dates promised, relationship context. To set this up, start small. Choose one team or one portfolio, define the list of event types, enter events for a few weeks, then adjust. If you want help with configuration and training for your teams, talk to Dolicraft through the contact page, or first try reading a customer record with its history on the demo.