If you were to believe what GoldMine tells you, you’d think that once an opportunity is closed (whether won or lost) then it can never be re-opened. Rubbish!

However, it does require a quick trip into SQL Management Studio so all the usual caveats apply: do a backup first and don’t attempt this if you’re not sure what you’re doing!

Opportunity records are held in the OpMgr table and can have the following rectypes:

O – open opportunity
OZL – lost opportunity
OZW – won opportunity

(you’ll see many other types of records in the table as well, such as those for linked contacts, issues etc, but we don’t have to worry about them)

Changing an OZL or OZW back to O is the first step in re-opening the opportunity.

However, there are two other fields that we also need to concern ourselves with:

Status: this will have been set to Lost, Won, Abandoned etc. This needs to be changed to Open

Stage: this will have been set to {closed – won} or (closed – lost) and will have to be set back to one of your own stages, as appropriate.

Exactly the same process can be applied to projects. Projects are also stored in the OpMgr table, but have the rectypes P for open projects and PC for completed ones.