When you create a deal, there is a default close date (end of current month). Every month, we have to postpone the close date of our deals to the next month.
In our industry, the time to close is more around 80 to 90 days. The deal forecast will be more accurate with a close date set 2 or 3 months after the create date.
My name is Sophie, I work on the team that builds HubSpot CRM. I wanted to address this idea and the frustration expressed recently at the end of this thread. The ability to set customize when the close date is set (or what is set to) for each account is something that we are interested in exploring in the future, but it's not on the immediate roadmap for this year.
We treat the deal Close Date property as the expected close date for the deal (until it is actually closed). The property is used in the Deal Forecast report to forecast revenue by month/quarter/year and so we set it automatically to ensure all deals show up in that report. While this property is given a default value, it is expected that the user will change this value to represent the expected close date when the deal is first created. If the user knows that the deal cycle is usually 80-90 days long, they should set the close date to 3 months time to reflect that (ensuring the deal forecast report is somewhat representative of the pipeline). When the deal is finally moved to a closed lost or closed won stage, we will update the deal close date to that day automatically to ensure accurate reporting and reduce the effort required to close a deal.
In terms of why this feature request has not been addressed sooner, while it is absolutely true that the more votes an idea gets the more likely it is to be reviewed by HubSpot's product team, there is no guarantee that ideas will be implemented based on a critical mass of votes. That said, it's not our intention, ever, for customers to feel unheard and we're actively looking into means of closing the loop in a faster and more transparent way.
If you have specific feedback about the CRM that you believe will make it easier and more efficient to use, please don't hesitate to message me directly.
Hi Sophie - thanks for respond. I too need to change it for my business however I want to leave as a date. I work in real estate investments so the date received is more impactful. Is there a way to leave it as a date and just change the text so I can say "date received" vs. "close date" ??
Yes, this is very frustrating. When I only want to sort deals by the ones that ACTUALLY have closed not just a random date in the future. Make this a toggle so we can turn it on or off.
Gotta say, even though I see the logic in requiring a default date for the Deal Forecast Report, why not at least allow users to customize the default date?
Ultimately, I would personally prefer if this could be customized to default with no value at all, but w/e.
I agree that it's not always helpful to be limited in what you can display on the deal boards. I'd like to see the ability to change it. Personally, I'd put one of our value fields in there if I could.
It just makes no logical sense to me why they auto-populate the Close Date on a deal that is not closed. Would it not be more logical to anticipate the Expect Close Date and leave the Close Date cleared until it actually closes? On the deals board, for any deal which is not closed, display the Expect Close Date. For any deal in a closed deal stage, display the Close Date. Why is this so difficult?
I agreed that the deal close date needs our help. Here is the thing, this is a property we can easily edit when the deal is set up. There is nothing that can predict when we want the deal to close.
@jennysowyrda while this has been submitted over 2 years ago, are there any plans to make adjustments to deal close dates or is this a tabled idea?
Absolutely agree, just increasing the chance that bad or innacurate data will be captured by autopopulating a date. Please make this field customizable!
Definitely would agree that not having the close date automatically apply on creation of deals would be much better for us - - the expected close date is a great idea, we like to apply the close date in this way once we have determined the date it is likely to close.
The current method also plays havoc with forecasting.
Here's another vote. Auto-populating the close date to the end of the month is less helpful than just leaving it blank. Ideal functionality would allow us customize the default close date as an interval of time from the create date.
Same request. Even though it is expected the user will update this field, it rarely happens. Deals that are created late in the month default to month-end and eventually show up in exceptions and add a task for each deal to update. This would unnecessary if we could update the default setting to a set time period (ie 30 days) after creation.
It would be better for our company to have the option to turn off a default close date. Generally, we only record "Close Dates" when the deal is closed. I encourage HubSpot to give the ability to turn off the default close date.
Thank you as always for your continued feedback, it helps us build a great product.
We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our priorities and roadmap to deliver as much value to our customers as possible. At this time, customizing the close date in deals is not something our team is currently planning to build natively into HubSpot. This is certainly subject to change in the future and we will update this idea if that becomes the case.
That's a shame Dylan. Doesn't really seem like it would be that difficult to remove the autofill for this field, at least. With 162 upvotes seems to me like something a lot of people are asking for.
Upvoting this feature as having a default close date which cannot be manipiulated does'nt make sense. As each company is unique, it needs to be configureable based on deal lifecycle. A simple adjustment to default should be simple and would save users a lot of hassle.