Records - The Hot List

Most pipelines have the same problem: the records that need working today look exactly like the ones that do not. The Hot List adds a row of filter chips and a few columns to your pipeline's list view that tell you which is which.

Nothing is stored. Every flag is worked out from date fields you already have, at the moment the page loads, and thrown away again. Book a call back at four o'clock and the lead stops reading as overdue at one minute past, rather than at whatever time the overnight job happens to run.

The four flags

Nothing scheduled. No next action date, and no open to-do against the record either. This is the one worth reading first. The other three describe a lead somebody is working badly. This one describes a lead nobody is working at all: not stalled, not lost, just invisible. It is routinely the largest group on a pipeline nobody has audited.

Follow-up overdue. The next action date has passed. Somebody said they would do a thing on a day, and that day has gone.

Going cold. Nothing logged in the last contacted field for longer than your threshold, 14 days unless you change it. A lead can be going cold and not overdue at the same time, and usually is, because a lead with no next action set never becomes overdue.

Rep window closed. How long a rep has had a lead they were handed, measured against your window, 30 days unless you change it. This is the flag that makes the list a management view rather than a personal to-do list.

A record with none of the four reads Scheduled, which is the answer you want most of the pipeline to give.

The chips

The chips sit above the table, each with a live count: Nothing scheduled (40), Follow-up overdue (12), and so on. Click one to filter the list to those records. Click it again to clear it.

One chip at a time. They are not meant to stack with each other, because two of them at once narrows to a question nobody actually asked. They do stack with the status and Assigned to filters next to them, which is where the useful combinations live: everything still open, assigned to Priya, with nothing scheduled.

The counts come from the same working-out the table does, so a chip can never promise a number the table then fails to produce. If a chip says 40, there are 40 records behind it.

The columns

Up to three extra columns appear on the right of the list, one for each field you have configured:

Follow-up shows "Due today", "6d overdue", "Nothing scheduled", or "Scheduled"
Contact shows how long since the last contact, or "Never"
Rep window shows how many days of the window are left, and counts past zero once it has closed

All three sort, most urgent first, and they sort on the underlying numbers rather than the text, so 12 days does not end up above 3 days.

Setting it up

Go to Settings, then General, and find the Hot list block under your sales pipeline settings.

There is no on/off switch. The Hot List runs when the fields point at something and does nothing when they do not, which means there is no switch to leave on while misconfigured, or set up correctly and leave off.

Three field pickers, all of them date fields on your pipeline section:

Next action date field. Drives Follow-up overdue, and its absence drives Nothing scheduled.
Last contacted field. Drives Going cold.
Date assigned to rep field. Starts the countdown on Rep window.

Plus two numbers:

Cold after (days), default 14
Rep window (days), default 30

Partial setup is fine and normal. Point at one field and you get that flag and that column, and nothing else. Point at none and your list view is exactly what it was yesterday, with no columns, no chips, and no extra work being done behind the scenes.

If you repoint your pipeline at a different section, or delete a field the Hot List was reading, ORCA checks the fields still belong to the section it is looking at and quietly ignores any that do not. A leftover setting cannot pull another section's dates into this one's flags.

Two things worth knowing

A lead nobody has ever contacted counts as cold, but not on the day it arrives. A blank last contacted field is the coldest thing in the pipeline, so treating it as "not cold" would hide precisely the records worth finding. ORCA falls back to the record's own age, so a lead imported this morning is not cold until it is older than your threshold. A freshly imported list does not light up red on day one.

Nothing scheduled counts open to-dos, not just the date field. A record with no next action date but an open to-do against it is being worked, so it does not get flagged. See Assignable To-Dos.

How this differs from the escalation clock

They answer adjacent questions and it is worth being clear about which is which.

The escalation clock is an automation. It runs overnight, and it does something: reassigns a record, ticks a field, raises a to-do. It acts once and moves on.

The Hot List does nothing. It is a way of looking at the list, worked out fresh every time you load the page, and it changes nothing on the record.

Most accounts want both. The clock catches what has gone badly wrong and puts it on somebody's list. The Hot List is what a rep looks at on Monday morning to decide where to start.