It would be really useful if on a lead/problem we had a closed date that we could report on. at the moment you can only choose the statuschanged or lastupdated date but if that is a change of substatus or something then this isnt the closed date any more.
I think it would also be useful to have the "closed from status" so that we can more easily create reports of how many leads are being closed directly from "unqualified" or "quoted" etc.
This information is already recorded, and clearly used when displaying the pipeline, but you cannot currently report on this in a useful and simple way. Storing this data in specific fields will allow users to write their own reports on this data, but also perhaps let us display the pipeline bar with more efficient queries (if the last status before close and close date were simple fields on the lead/problem).
For historical data, we could accurately populate this from the lead and problem status history (lactnlog and pactnlog)
Recently a customer asked for a report of
"all leads that have been closed in a given date range" - pretty easy to do other than the fact that this customer has lead status' after sold - so the status change date keeps moving forward.
It is possible to do this starting at lead action log, however, that causes a potential issue if the lead got closed and then re-opened, and closed again and so will appear twice. A closed date would make this much easier