The Salesforce Opportunity — a potential sale or deal — carries the standard fields that run your pipeline and forecast. Most are simple; a few interlock in ways worth knowing. This covers those, and the full standard-field reference has the table across Opportunity, Account, Contact, Lead, and Case.
The stage is the master field
StageName(Picklist) — the current pipeline stage. This is the field everything else keys off. When you change the stage, Salesforce cascades several others:Probability(Percent) — usually derived from the stage's configured default (you can override it, but it's populated from the stage).ForecastCategoryName(Picklist) — which forecast bucket the deal rolls up to (Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed); also driven by the stage's setup.IsClosed(Checkbox, read-only) andIsWon(Checkbox, read-only) — system-maintained from the stage. You don't set these directly; they're determined by whether the stage you picked is a closed/won stage. This is why you can't just check "won" — you move the stage.
So a lot of "why did that field change on its own" on Opportunity traces back to the stage doing its job.
Amount — and the products gotcha
Amount(Currency) — the deal's total. Simple until the opportunity uses products (line items). Once it has line items, Amount becomes a calculated roll-up of them and turns read-only — you can't type into it anymore, because it's the sum of the products. Teams hit this the day they turn on products and wonder why Amount stopped being editable.
The rest
Name(Text) — the deal name.AccountId(Lookup to Account) — the account the deal belongs to.CloseDate(Date) — expected (or actual) close date; drives which forecast period the deal lands in.Type(Picklist) — new vs existing business.LeadSource(Picklist) — where the deal originated.NextStep(Text) — the next planned action.OwnerId(Lookup to User) — the deal owner.
The honest catch — this is the standard set, not your pipeline
Every field above exists in every org. What makes your Opportunity yours is the custom fields your team added — the scoring fields, the competitor picklist, the three "stage 2.5" workarounds — plus your specific stage picklist and which standard fields you actually use. A generic reference can't describe those.
That's the boundary: this makes you fluent in the standard Opportunity fields; seeing your org's real Opportunity — custom fields described, which are even used, who can read the sensitive ones — is a question about your metadata. SchemaForce inventories every field on Opportunity (standard and custom), describes each in plain language, and shows usage and field-level security, so your pipeline's data model stops being tribal knowledge.
