Use 17hats Pipelines To View Your Revenue Streams At A Glance

By Nicole Larson, Systems Consultant, 17hats Ambassador and Marketplace Partner. Adapted from her feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey.

Most pipelines are built to answer one question: where is this job right now?

The phases walk a single service from first inquiry through to final delivery. Lead, quote sent, booked, in progress, complete. It works, and if you sell one core service it may be the only pipeline you ever need.

But if you sell more than one thing, that setup quietly hides something. A process pipeline shows you the journey of one job at a time. It can’t show you your business at a glance, meaning how much active client work is sitting inside each of your services right now.

Nicole Larson’s answer was to build a second pipeline where the phases are her services instead of her steps. Same tool, different question.

Phases become offers

In a process pipeline, a card moving forward means the work advanced. In an offer pipeline, each phase is one of the things you sell, and a client’s card simply lands in the phase for whatever they hired you to do.

Her own board has a lane for each service: Tech Checks, 17hats Setup, Custom Quote, Systems Support, Workshop Bookings. When she books someone, their project card drops into the lane for that service and stays there.

So she isn’t only tracking how far along a particular job is. She’s tracking how many of each service she’s actively delivering at this moment, which turns out to be a different and more useful thing to know.

At the time she wrote this, 19 active clients were stacked in Systems Support while Custom Quote and Workshop Booking both sat at zero. Looking at jobs one at a time, that imbalance is nearly invisible. You’d feel busy, and you’d be busy, and you wouldn’t necessarily notice that all of it was happening inside one service while two others had gone quiet.

On the offer board it’s the first thing you see.

Building one

You don’t need anything you don’t already have. The whole thing is one new pipeline and some tags you’re probably already using.

Start by creating a new Client Pipeline and naming it for the view rather than the process. “Offers” or “Active Work” does the job and keeps it clearly distinct from the pipeline that tracks your actual steps.

Then make each phase a service you sell, and assign the Project Tag that will place clients in it. Order the lanes the way you actually think about your business, whether that’s highest value first or most common first. This matters more than it sounds, because the whole point is reading the board quickly, and a lane order that fights your mental model slows that down.

Drop your current clients in by applying the matching Project Tag to each one. That’s the only manual pass you’ll do.

Now the step that keeps it alive: add those same Project Tags to your service Workflows, whether that’s through a Lead Capture Form, a Questionnaire, or a workflow that fires after someone pays. From then on, when clients book work, the tag is applied for you and the card places itself.

That last step is not optional in practice. A board that depends on you remembering to tag things is accurate for about three weeks, and then it becomes a source of mild guilt you avoid looking at.

What you start noticing

Once it’s running for a month or two, the offer pipeline becomes something close to a leading indicator of your profit and loss report, broken out by income category. It’s showing you, in real time, the work that will become revenue later.

It answers things a process pipeline never could. Which service is carrying the business right now. Whether your high-value offer is getting real work or whether everything has clustered in the cheapest thing you provide. Where your capacity is actually going, as opposed to where you assume it’s going.

That gap between assumption and reality is usually wider than people expect. Most of us carry a story about which offer is the main thing, and the story is frequently a year out of date. You raised prices on one service and stopped marketing another and hired for a third, and the mental picture never updated.

There’s also a decision it makes easier. When it’s time to work out what to promote next, or where to add capacity, you’re reading what’s genuinely on your plate instead of guessing from memory and vibes.

Use both, deliberately

To be clear, this doesn’t replace your process pipelines. They’re companions, and Nicole runs both.

The process pipeline still carries each job from start to finish, telling you what needs to happen next for a particular client. The offer pipeline sits above it and shows you the shape of the whole business at once. One tells you where a job is. The other tells you where your business is.

A client project can appear in both without any conflict, which is part of why this is worth twenty minutes rather than a redesign.

Worth a try if you sell more than one thing

If you’ve only ever built pipelines to track a journey, building one that tracks your offers is a small experiment with a decent chance of showing you something you didn’t know.

And if you sell essentially one service, this probably isn’t for you yet. Keep it in your back pocket for whenever you add the second.

Questions that come up

What is an offer pipeline?
A pipeline whose phases are the services you sell rather than the stages of a process. Each active client’s card sits in the lane for the service they hired you for, so one screen shows how your workload is distributed across your offers.

How is it different from a normal pipeline?
A process pipeline tracks one job from inquiry to delivery and answers “where is this job?” An offer pipeline tracks how much work is live in each service and answers “where is my business?”

Can you run two pipelines at once?
Yes, and that’s the intended setup. The same client project can appear in both.

How often should you look at it?
Weekly is plenty. You’re watching for shifts in distribution, like a service going quiet or one absorbing more capacity than it’s worth, not day-to-day movement.

What if most of my work is one service anyway?
Then a single process pipeline is probably serving you fine. The offer view earns its keep once you have three or four services and genuinely can’t say offhand which one is busiest.

Nicole offers Two Hours of Live Tech Support through the 17hats Marketplace if you’d rather build this with someone looking over your shoulder.

Pipelines, project tags and workflows all come with your 17hats account, so tracking your process and your offers side by side doesn’t cost anything extra. Start a free 7-day trial.

About the author

Nicole Larson helps creative business owners and service providers turn scattered tools into calm, dependable systems they actually use. She’s known for 17hats setups built around how you really work: the workflows, pipelines and automations that quietly run your backend so the business feels lighter.

Want to see what that could look like for you? Start with a connection call through the 17hats Marketplace.

This article is adapted from Nicole’s feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey, 17hats’ magazine for solo business owners. Read the full issue here.