Cookbook
Run an admissions funnel beside your admissions platform
An admissions funnel is not a sales pipeline with different words on it. The cycle resets every year, the metric is yield rather than revenue, and one person can apply twice. This is how to hold that.
What this is, and what it is not
Start here, because it decides whether the rest is worth your time. Your admissions platform does things Indraft does not: application forms, the applicant portal, document collection, reader review with rating forms, decision release, event registration, the mail. None of that is here and none of it is coming.
What this recipe builds is the layer beside it. The platform stays the system of record for the application itself. Indraft becomes the place an agent works the funnel: what a counsellor concluded about a territory, why a deposited student went quiet, the nightly reconciliation nobody has time to run. If you want the pattern in general rather than for admissions, it has its own page.
One more thing to settle before a pilot. Student records are regulated, and we make no compliance claim about that. What we will tell you is exactly how the data is held and who can reach it, on the security page, and you can decide against your own obligations.
The modelling decision everything rests on
The application moves, not the applicant. That sounds obvious and it is the thing most systems get wrong: they attach a stage to the person, and then a student who applies for spring after being denied for fall either overwrites their own history or becomes a second person.
So an application is its own record, carrying the entry term, the programme, residency and whether a deposit is in. It points at the applicant and at their secondary school. And it moves through a funnel of your stages, which is the part worth knowing is possible here.
You
A funnel on your own type behaves exactly like a pipeline on a deal, which means an application advances through stages, the terminal stages mean something, and the whole thing is reportable. That last sentence in the instruction is the one people forget: a field has to be asked for as countable when the type is made, and discovering otherwise in February is an expensive way to learn it.
The cycle, both years at once
Everything in admissions is against a term, and the only number anybody believes is this year against last year at the same point.
You
Agent
One question, one call, thirty applications. Fall 2026 is finished so it has drained to the terminal stages; fall 2027 is mid-cycle with the weight still in Admitted. That comparison is the whole job of a funnel report and it is the thing that usually takes an export.
The reconciliation worth running nightly
This is the one that earns the setup. A deposit arrives, and the stage does not move, because the payment landed in one system and the funnel lives in another. The student has paid and is invisible to your enrolled count.
You
Agent
One out of fifteen, in a workspace of thirty records, seeded deliberately. In a real cycle of four thousand that is the class of gap that shows up as a melt number nobody can explain in June. An agent can run this every night and tell you the moment it is more than none.
One thing worth knowing about asking
On a type you defined, a field is addressed by the name you declared it under. Term is just the term. There is a prefixed form used for a field added to a built-in record like a company, and if you carry that habit across you will be told which spelling this type wants rather than simply that the field cannot be filtered.
The same goes for the school an application points at: ask by the name you declared the relationship under. The funnel report comes back with your stage names rather than identifiers, so what you read is Admitted and Deposited, exactly as a sales team reads Qualified and Proposal.
What the agent is actually for here
Not data entry, which your platform already does better. The work is the reading nobody has time for: which programmes are behind last year at the same date, which admitted students have had no contact in three weeks, which secondary schools sent applicants who all withdrew. Those are questions rather than reports, and the reason they never get asked is that each one is a query somebody has to build.
Verify it
- Apply the same person twice, to different terms. You should get two applications and one applicant. If you get two applicants, the model has the stage on the person and the whole thing will drift within a cycle.
- Compare a cycle total to your platform's. They must agree on the day you set this up, or you are building on a number nobody will trust later.
- Advance one application and re-run the funnel. Both the stage it left and the stage it entered should move by one.
- Run the deposit reconciliation before you need it. Its value is entirely in being routine, and a check first run in May is a check that finds a year of accumulated gaps at the worst moment.
Run it again
The funnel weekly through the cycle and daily in the four weeks before a deposit deadline. The reconciliation nightly. When the cycle turns over, nothing is archived and nothing is reset: the previous term stays exactly where it is, which is what makes the year-on-year comparison possible at all. Keeping the two systems from fighting is the beside-your-CRM recipe, and it applies here unchanged.