Opportunity records and the deal shell

What it does

An opportunity is the record that holds a deal you're actively working: the customer, the money, the expected close date and the products. It's created either by qualifying a lead or from scratch, and it's the parent for every quote, order and invoice that follows.

Key facts

Two creation routes: qualify a lead (field values copy across, the two records stay linked, and lead activities and notes carry over to the opportunity) or create the opportunity directly for deals that never existed as a lead.
Currency is effectively a one-way door. The header and every line item must share a currency, and you can't change the opportunity currency once line items exist — you'd have to delete all of them first. Quotes, orders and invoices generated downstream inherit it.
Estimated Revenue has two modes: System Calculated (rolled up from the product lines) and User Provided (a number the seller types). The choice is per record, on the Products tab, and it changes whether the revenue field is writable.
Estimated Close Date drives most of the pipeline and forecast reporting downstream. Nothing enforces that it's in the future.
The out-of-the-box business process flow moves through Qualify, Develop, Propose and Close. Stage progression is separate from the record's status — an opportunity sitting in Propose is still Open.
Copy opportunity clones a deal. Account, primary contact, currency, estimated value, budget, description, purchase timeframe and ratings copy immediately; product lines with their quantities and prices, stakeholder connections with their roles, and custom fields copy after the save completes.
The copy resets status to Open, sales stage to the first stage, owner to the current user, and blanks actual close date, actual revenue and competitor. Activities, notes, attachments, quotes, orders, invoices and the timeline are not copied.
Copy needs Create privilege on the Opportunity table and can be switched off by an administrator.
Related records that hang off the opportunity and matter on real projects: stakeholders, sales team, competitors, and the opportunity's own product lines.

When to use / skip

There isn't really a "skip" here — if you're implementing Sales, opportunities are the spine. The judgment call is how much you put on them. The common failure is treating the opportunity as a data-entry exercise: thirty fields, half of them mandatory, none of them reported on. Sellers stop updating the record, the forecast goes stale, and the client blames the product.

Decide early whether the opportunity is a deal or a deal line. If the client sells one thing per opportunity, product lines are overhead and a single revenue figure is honest enough. If they sell mixed baskets and need product-level pipeline, the product lines have to be real and system-calculated revenue becomes mandatory, which pulls the whole product catalogue and price list conversation forward into the build.

Also decide whether you're using lead qualification at all. Plenty of B2B clients have no lead stage worth the name and create opportunities directly. Forcing a lead layer on them just adds a click and a second set of duplicate rules.

Configuration decisions

System-calculated versus user-provided revenue as the standard. Pick one and enforce it, because a mixed estate makes pipeline totals meaningless.
Whether opportunities are always created by qualifying a lead, or can be created directly — and if both, which fields the direct route makes mandatory to match what qualification would have populated.
Which currency set the organisation actually trades in, and whether sellers pick currency or it's defaulted from the account. Get this wrong and you're deleting line items to fix records.
Whether to keep the four-stage out-of-the-box process flow, extend it, or replace it with something matching the client's actual sales methodology.
Whether the copy-opportunity command stays enabled. It's useful for renewals and repeat orders; it's a duplicate-generation machine for clients with weak data discipline.
What "Open" means operationally — whether an opportunity can sit open indefinitely, and whether you need a stale-deal process to force closure.

Gotchas

Currency again: sellers who pick the wrong currency, add ten product lines and then notice have no in-app fix other than clearing every line. Default it from the account and consider making it read-only after save.
Switching an opportunity from user-provided to system-calculated revenue overwrites what the seller typed with the roll-up. Nobody expects that in a demo.
Estimated Revenue and Actual Revenue are different fields. Reports built on Estimated Revenue silently include won deals at their forecast value rather than what was actually booked.
Copy fires in two passes — header first, lines and connections after the save. If a plug-in or business rule on Opportunity Product throws, you get a copied opportunity with missing lines and only the timeline records what was skipped.
Lead-to-opportunity mapping is the standard Dataverse relationship mapping. Custom fields added to Lead after go-live do not map themselves; someone has to add the mapping, and the failure is silent.
Duplicate detection on Opportunity is off by default in most builds. Sellers working the same account will happily create three copies of the same deal.

Consultant notes

Demo the qualify-a-lead path and the direct-create path side by side in the first workshop. The client's reaction tells you immediately whether their lead process is real or aspirational.
Push back hard on mandatory fields at creation. Get the record created, then use the process flow stages to demand detail as the deal matures — that's what stage-gating is for.
Before go-live, check the Lead-to-Opportunity field mappings against the custom fields you've added. It's a five-minute check that saves a post-go-live data gap.
Agree the definition of Estimated Close Date in writing. "When we expect the money" and "when we expect the signature" are different dates and the forecast team will assume the one you didn't pick.
If the client wants product-level pipeline, say out loud in the scoping session that this means a maintained product catalogue and price lists per currency. It's usually the largest hidden cost in an Opportunities workstream.

Worth another look if the client adds a second trading currency, or if lead qualification gets reworked.