Authored by Samuel Glauser as CRM/DesignBrief on memex.systemorph.com (2026-08-28), reproduced verbatim. Where the first release of the CRM answers a requirement, the Guide names the record and the field; the OPEN items are still open.

Before any MeshWeaver cleverness, the thing has to be a CRM. This brief states the capabilities that are non-negotiable — if any one of these is missing, sales will keep their real pipeline in a spreadsheet and the system is dead regardless of how elegant it is. Five areas, written as requirements.

1. A trustworthy record of who we deal with

Accounts, the people at them, and the relationships between both — including the messy realities: one person moving between two client companies, a group with subsidiaries we sell to separately, a partner who is also a customer, a contact who must not be emailed again. Requirements:

• One canonical record per company and per person, with merge for the duplicates that will inevitably be created.
• Contact belongs to account over time — history preserved when someone changes employer, not overwritten.
• Consent / do-not-contact status is a first-class field, not a note. GDPR: we must be able to answer "what do you hold on me" and delete it.

2. Pipeline you can forecast from

An opportunity with a stage, an amount, a currency, an expected close date, and an owner — and, critically, a history of those values so "the forecast moved" is an answerable question.

• Explicit, few, defined stages with entry criteria. Stages nobody can define are stages nobody will set correctly.
• Weighted and unweighted forecast per period, per owner, per segment.
• Snapshotting: last quarter's forecast as it stood then, not as re-derived from today's data.
• OPEN: do we model recurring/subscription revenue separately from project revenue? Our business has both and they forecast differently.

3. Activity history that accrues without being typed in

The single hardest CRM requirement: the log has to be near-complete, and humans will not maintain it manually. What was said, when, by whom, on which opportunity.

• Emails and meetings attach themselves to the right account/opportunity automatically, from the address book and the calendar.
• Manual notes are cheap to add — two clicks from wherever you already are.
• Everything is attributable and time-stamped; nothing silently rewritten.

4. Work that gets driven, not just recorded

A CRM that only remembers is a filing cabinet. Requirements:

• Tasks and next actions with owners and due dates, surfaced where the owner will see them.
• Rules that notice absence, not just events: "proposal sent, no reply in 14 days", "account with no contact in 6 months".
• Notifications the owner actually configured — escalation to email for what matters, silence otherwise.

5. Reporting and the exit door

• Standard views (pipeline by stage, win/loss, activity per rep, aging) plus ad-hoc query for anything else.
• Export of everything, in a documented format, at any time. The whole point of not renting a CRM is not being locked in; we must not rebuild the lock-in ourselves.
• Access control per account and per opportunity — commission-relevant and salary-adjacent data is not all-hands readable.

Non-functional, briefly

Fast enough to use during a phone call (sub-second on the common views). Usable on a phone for the read path. Auditable. And it must survive its author leaving — no undocumented cleverness in one person's head.

What this brief deliberately does not decide

How much of the above is built vs. deferred, and in which order. That comes after we agree the list is right. Argue with the list first — comments on this node.