Business system brief

1. Business goal

Write the business outcome in plain language. Examples: capture more qualified leads, reduce manual quote work, track service jobs, or give leadership a daily operations view.

2. Users

List every user group: customers, sales, operations, finance, admin, managers and external partners. Note what each group needs to create, view, approve or export.

3. Entities

Name the core records the system needs. Common examples include leads, contacts, companies, products, quotes, invoices, jobs, tasks, notes and files.

4. Workflows

Document the workflow from first trigger to final outcome. Include manual steps, approvals, notifications, retries and exception paths.

5. Source systems

List spreadsheets, CRMs, email inboxes, forms, payment tools and databases that currently hold useful data.

6. Reporting

Define the decisions the dashboard should support. Each report should have an owner, a cadence and a next action.

7. Launch constraints

Capture deadlines, access limitations, data cleanup needs, compliance concerns, budget range and who signs off before launch.