Chariot lets you record why you lose or disqualify a lead. Over time, these reasons reveal trends you can act on — where you're losing winnable jobs, how to raise your booking rate, and where there may be an opportunity to offer a new service and capture business you're currently turning away.
Lost reasons and disqualified reasons are managed together in Chariot as one concept we call Outcome Reasons. This article covers how to set them up for your company and how to apply them to jobs day to day.
Lost vs. Disqualified: What's the Difference?
You can use these two stages however you like, but here's how we intend them to work:
Lost: Opportunities you realistically could have won — you service the area, you offer the service they needed, and so on. These are included in your win-rate reporting, so they're the leads to study when you're asking what's hurting your close rate.
Disqualified: Leads that were never realistically winnable — the move was outside your service area, too small, or needed something you don't offer (like storage). These are excluded from close-rate reporting so they don't drag down your numbers, but it's still valuable to know why unwinnable leads are coming in.
Setting Up Your Outcome Reasons
Chariot ships with a set of default lost and disqualified reasons, so you can start using the feature right away — and you can customize them to fit your company.
To find your Outcome Reasons:
Go to Company → Settings.
Scroll all the way to the right to the Outcome Reasons section.
You'll see two separate lists: Lost Reasons and Disqualified Reasons.
Understanding Each Reason
Every reason has a few settings:
Icon: A visual marker for the reason. This is up to you. Chariot doesn't pre-load icons, but you can pull them from a site like Emojipedia, or ask ChatGPT or Claude to suggest a fitting one.
Internal label: The name your team sees in Chariot and in reporting (for example, Chose competitor).
Show to customer: A toggle for whether the reason appears to customers when they decline an estimate.
Customer-facing label: A separate, customer-friendly version of the label. For example, internally you might use Chose competitor, but the customer sees Preferred another moving company.
Status: Whether the reason is Active or Archived.
Not every reason should be customer-visible. Something like Stopped responding is useful internally but wouldn't make sense to show a customer — so switch Show to customer off for reasons like that.
Adding a Reason
Click Add Reason, then set the icon, internal label, customer visibility, and customer-facing label.
Archiving a Reason
If you don't want to use one of the defaults (or one of your own), click into it and choose Archive. Archiving keeps the reason attached to any historical jobs that already used it but hides it going forward. Reasons are archived rather than deleted so your past reporting stays intact.
A Note for Multi-Site Companies
If you run a parent account with sub-accounts for different locations, you can set a standardized set of lost and disqualified reasons for the whole company from the parent (umbrella) account. Each location can then add its own additional reasons on top of that shared set — giving you consistency across the organization plus flexibility per location.
Adding or editing a Reason to a Lead/Job
Marking a Job Lost or Disqualified
Open the job and go to the stage selector in the top-right of the page.
Change the stage to Lost or Disqualified.
If Outcome Reasons is set up for your company, you'll be required to choose a reason before you can save.
Pick the reason (for example, Stopped responding), add any optional notes, and click Save.
Once saved, the reason appears on the right-hand side of the intake page.
Editing a Reason After the Fact
Picked the wrong reason, or want to add context later? You can edit the outcome reason and its notes right from the intake page at any time — just click the reason and change it.
When a Customer Declines Their Estimate
When you send an estimate, the customer has the option to decline it. If Outcome Reasons is set up, they'll see your customer-visible reasons, pick one (for example, Too expensive), and can leave a note (such as their budget).
Back in Chariot on the office side, refresh the job and you'll see the outcome reason filled in automatically — labeled as a customer-declined reason, along with the customer's note. No manual entry needed.
Bulk-Updating Jobs to Lost or Disqualified
This comes up a lot when you're cleaning out Chariot (which we recommend doing regularly). Say you sort by move date and spot a batch of jobs whose move dates have already passed, and you want to move them all to Lost at once:
Use filtering to narrow down the jobs you want.
Select them — click the checkbox to select all, or multi-select by clicking a checkbox and Shift-clicking to grab a range (just like Gmail).
Bulk update the stage to Lost or Disqualified.
When prompted for a reason:
If they were all lost for the same reason (for example, Chose competitor), pick it and choose Apply to All.
If the reasons differ or you're not sure, click Skip for now. The stage still updates, and you can fill in each reason later — on the individual job or from the Archive.
Updating Reasons from the Archive Tables (Lost and Disqualified)
Recently turned the feature on, or have older jobs that were closed without a reason?
You can fix those from the archive:
Go to Operations → Archive.
Filter to the Lost and Disqualified stages.
You'll see those jobs and their current outcome reason. Click any job to set or change its reason.
You can sort by date or recent activity to review why you've been losing jobs lately.
Reporting
Chariot includes reports where you can pull your lost and disqualified reasons and analyze the data — so you can spot the patterns behind where leads are going and find paths to win more jobs.
