Where a lead comes from
Three places. Somebody fills in the enquiry form on your published website; somebody requests a booking through your booking page; or you type one in yourself from the Capture form when a person phones or stops you in the street.
All three land in the same inbox and are stored against your business. An empty Leads screen means you genuinely have none — there is no sample data hiding real ones.
The number beside a lead is not a rating
Each lead carries a number out of a hundred, and it is easy to read it as how promising the person is. It is not. It measures only how complete the record is — whether there is a usable email address, a name, a phone number and a message of any length.
It says nothing about the person, their budget or their likelihood of booking, and Sitterz does not rank your leads or tell you who to call first. A low number means you are missing details, not that the enquiry is poor.
Statuses only move forwards
A new lead can become contacted, qualified or lost. A contacted one can become qualified or lost. Converted and lost are both endings. If you try a move the sequence does not allow, the server refuses it and tells you which moves are available instead of failing quietly.
Converted is never something you set by hand — it is what happens when you actually convert the lead.
Converting one
Converting does four things at once: it closes the lead as converted, creates a contact record for the family, opens a deal at the first stage, and copies their original message onto that contact's activity so the first thing they told you is not lost.
It is safe to press twice. The contact is created under the lead's own identifier, so a repeat attempt lands on the same person rather than creating a second one. If the contact is made but the deal is not, you are told exactly that rather than being shown a clean success.
A lead you have already marked lost cannot be converted. Reopen it first — the sequence treats lost as an ending, and quietly un-ending it behind your back would be worse.
Duplicates, and the one case that slips through
A lead you capture by hand and a lead from your website form are both matched against your open leads by email address, and a match is folded into the existing lead rather than creating a second one.
Booking requests are the exception: every request writes its own lead, even from a family who has enquired before. If a familiar name appears twice, that is why.
Who can do what
Staff can open Leads and read it, and that is all — capturing, changing a status, assigning an owner, converting and importing all need permissions an Owner or a Manager holds. Renaming the pipeline stages themselves is the Owner alone, and the stages are a fixed set you can relabel rather than a list you can add to.