Contacts and companies

The people and companies the workspace knows: contacts with their addresses and phones, companies that may or may not be customers, and who may see and change them.

The CRM keeps the people and the companies the workspace deals with, on the records the other modules already have: a company is the organization the helpdesk already knows as a customer account and invoicing as the customer a project is billed to, and the people who raise requests or send a public form are contacts from then on. A deal is a ticket in a sales project (see Sales pipeline), and what happens with a person is an interaction: a note, a call, a meeting, an email or a follow-up (see Interactions and follow-ups). This page is about the people and the companies.

The CRM menu

Every CRM page carries a menu down its left edge, as a project's and the time pages do: Contacts, Companies and Reports (the sales reports). It starts as a rail of icons; hover over one for its name, or press the chevron at its foot to show the labels. The browser remembers the choice, for every rail alike. On a phone the rail gives way to a bar at the top of the page naming the page you are on: tap it for the same entries. CRM in the header opens it, on its contacts, for anyone who may see it.

Who may see and change the CRM

Three permissions, held on roles like any other:

They reach as far as the role that carries them:

• A role on a company, given on its page under Administration, Organisations, applies to that company and its contacts, and nothing else. An account manager on one customer sees that customer and its people, changes them, and merges, exports and erases its contacts; other companies, and contacts with no company, are not in their lists or their search. Deals are tickets, so the sales reports count every deal they may see in a sales pipeline, as the pipeline's project roles decide.
• A workspace CRM role, given under Administration, CRM access, applies to every company and to contacts with no company. One role a person or group. It adds to any role on a company: a salesperson with the Sales role here edits every company and still manages the one where they are account manager.
• A role on a project gives nothing in the CRM, whatever it holds.

Making a company, and a contact with no company, need the workspace CRM role. The seeded Sales role sees and edits the CRM; Account manager manages it; administrators do everything; customers never see the CRM. A read-only AI agent keeps seeing and nothing more.

A deal is a ticket, so who sees a deal is its pipeline project's affair: a role in the sales project, as for any ticket. The interactions on a deal's timeline still follow the company they concern.

Contacts

Contacts lists the people the workspace knows, one to a row. A contact has:

• a name and a job title;
• a company, or none;
• an owner, the member who looks after the relationship;
• a stage: lead, qualified, customer or former;
• any number of email addresses and phone numbers, one of each primary, and postal addresses;
• notes in Markdown, and any custom fields an administrator has made for contacts.

An email address belongs to one contact in the workspace, so a message from it finds that contact and nobody else. A phone number is kept as you typed it and matched by its digits.

New contact takes the name, a title, the first address and number, the company, the stage and the owner, and opens the contact's page.

Finding a contact

The search box (or the f key) narrows the list by name, title or address, My contacts keeps only the contacts you own, the stage, company and owner filters narrow it further, Archived shows the contacts that were archived instead, and the order can be by name or newest first. Fifty contacts are shown at a time, with Previous and Next under the list, and the filters and page are part of the page address.

People who already have an account

A helpdesk customer, and a person who sent a public request form, is a contact as well: the contact carries their account, their address and their organisation as its company, and the requests they raised are listed on the contact's page. Members are not contacts. Where a contact was made first and the person later gets an account with the same address, merging keeps them one.

A contact's page

The page shows the details, which anyone who may edit the CRM changes in place with Save details; the addresses, numbers and postal addresses, each added, made primary or removed; the custom fields; their timeline of interactions, with Log a call beside each number and Email to write to them; the tickets and requests the contact raised, as far as you may see them; and the contact's history, every change with who made it and when.

Archive takes a contact out of the lists and search and keeps everything about them; Restore brings them back. Whoever manages the CRM can merge another contact into this one: its addresses, numbers, postal addresses, fields, interactions and deal roles move here, what this contact lacked (a company, a title, an owner, an account) is filled from the other, and the other is archived with a note in both histories.

Companies

Companies lists every organization the workspace knows, customers or not, as a card with its stage, industry, size, email domains and owner. A company has a name, its email domains (a person whose address is at one of them is matched to the company, except at a public mail service such as Gmail), a website, an industry, a size band, a stage (lead, prospect, customer or former), an account owner, a description, postal addresses and any custom fields made for companies.

Anyone who may edit the CRM can make a company. A company becomes a customer, with billing details, contracts and projects billed to it, only when an administrator presses Make a customer on its page, after which the usual customer rules apply (Customers and invoicing). The organizations an administrator creates under Administration are customers from the start.

Finding a company

The search box (or the f key) narrows the list by name, industry or email domain, My companies keeps only the companies you own, the stage filter narrows it further, Customers only keeps those with billing details, and the order can be by name or newest first. Twenty companies are shown at a time, with Previous and Next under the list, and the filters and page are part of the page address.

A company's page

The page shows the company's details, edited in place; its contacts; the projects billed to it; its deals with their totals; its open tickets and requests, as far as you may see them; its timeline; and its history. A customer's page adds Billing and contracts, which opens the customer under Time for those who may see billing. Archive and Restore work as for a contact.

Custom fields on contacts and companies

An administrator makes a custom field under Custom fields and says what it applies to: tickets, contacts or companies. A contact or company field applies to every contact or company, is shown on their pages and edited there, and every change is in the history. The types that name a project's versions or components cannot be used outside a project.