2. People

Everything in CRM City hangs off a contact. Deals, invoices, bookings, tickets, enrolments, donations — all of them point back at a person. Get this chapter right and the rest of the product has something to stand on.

2.1 Contacts

A contact is a person. Name, email, phone, address, date of birth, where they came from, plus whatever custom fields you have defined.

Three fields do more work than they look like they do.

Source records where the person came from — typed by hand, imported, a web form, a booking, Telegram, the API. Six months later this is how you find out which channel actually brings you people worth having.

Last contacted updates itself. You never set it. Every activity logged against the contact pushes it forward automatically, at the database level, regardless of whether the activity came from you typing a note or from an email the system sent.

Lead score is a running total, not a snapshot. Behaviour adds and subtracts points, and crossing a threshold emits an event of its own. Covered in chapter 6.

The timeline

The contact page merges activities, reminders and emails into one chronological timeline. This is the answer to "what is going on with this person" and it is the reason to log things: the value is not in any single entry, it is in being able to read two years in thirty seconds.

Reminders can repeat: yearly on the calendar date (name days, anniversaries — the date never drifts, leap years included) or every N days, from daily upward (a visit you make three times a month is "every 10 days"). Ticking a repeating reminder does not close it — it schedules the next occurrence, computed from the planned date, and skipped cycles are jumped over rather than piling up as overdue copies.

Deleting

Two levels, deliberately different.

Delete is recoverable. The contact disappears from lists but the row survives, and it can be brought back.

Erase is permanent and irreversible — the GDPR right to be forgotten. Because it cannot be undone, it makes you type a confirmation phrase by hand, including the person's name. That friction is intentional. If you can erase someone by clicking twice without thinking, eventually you will.

What erasure clears, and what it deliberately does not. Erasure removes the person's identity everywhere the product stores it — their record, addresses, message contents they wrote, raw payloads from connected platforms, webhook deliveries that carried them. What stays is your business record: invoices, deals, quotes and tickets survive with the person unlinked, and so do the notes and descriptions your team wrote — those are your bookkeeping, the same category as the invoice.

Which leads to the one habit worth adopting on day one: write notes about the work, not about the person's identifiers. "Prefers morning calls, deciding in Q3" survives an erasure cleanly; "email her at maria@…, sister of the landlord at 12 Elm St" plants personal data in a field no automated erasure will ever find. The product clears every structured field for you — free text is the one place where minimisation is your job, not ours.

2.2 Companies

A company is an organisation, and the link between contacts and companies is many-to-many. One person can belong to several organisations, and one of those links can be marked primary.

This matters more than it sounds. Most CRMs make a contact belong to exactly one company, which forces you to duplicate a person who sits on two boards, or consults for three clients, or is both a member of your church and a supplier to it. Here you do not duplicate — you attach them twice.

The company page lists its people. Focus mode (chapter 3) can narrow the entire dashboard to a single company.

2.3 Activities

An activity is a thing that happened with a person: a call, an email, a meeting, a message, or a note.

That last one is different from the other four in a way that matters. A note is something you write about someone; the other four are contacts they actually experienced. The product knows the difference and uses it — over-contact is counted from calls, emails, meetings and messages only. Otherwise the most conscientious note-taker in your team would look like the biggest pest, which would be exactly backwards.

Quick catch-up

On the dashboard and on contact pages there is a one-line box. You spoke to someone, you write one line, you press enter. That counts as a touch, refreshes their health immediately, and takes them off the neglected list.

It exists because the alternative — a form with a type dropdown, a date picker, a subject and a body — is the reason people stop logging things after two weeks.

What fills in by itself

Email you send through the product, inbound email captured by BCC, Telegram messages in and out, public bookings, and events pushed in through the API or a connector all land on the timeline as activities without you doing anything.

What you have to log by hand is everything that happened offline. That is the honest cost of using this product properly, and it is small.

2.4 Tags

Free-form labels on contacts and companies. Create them in Settings → Tags, then attach them anywhere.

Tags are not decoration — they are the segmentation mechanism the rest of the product reads. A tag can be a campaign audience, an automation condition, an automation action ("when a deal is won, tag them customer"), an API segment filter, or a focus lens.

Practical advice: keep them few and mean something. Thirty tags with four contacts each is a filing system nobody uses, including you.

2.5 Custom fields

Settings → Custom fields. Define your own fields on contacts or companies — text, number, date, select, and so on. They appear on the forms and are editable inline on the record.

This is how the product moulds itself to your work without a developer. An estate agent needs "budget" and "preferred area". A pastor needs "small group" and "baptism date". A coach needs "goal" and "sessions remaining". None of those belong in a general CRM's schema, and all of them are the reason people abandon general CRMs.

Presets pre-create a small set at onboarding so you start with something rather than an empty page.

2.6 Duplicates

Two mechanisms, at different moments.

At creation, the form warns you if what you are typing looks like someone already in the database. This catches the common case before it happens.

Afterwards, Settings → Duplicates lists candidates and lets you merge. You pick which record survives; every related row — activities, deals, tags, files, enrolments, company links — is re-pointed at the survivor, and the losing record is soft-deleted. Nothing is lost. The merge is written to the audit log.

2.7 Getting people in

CSV import (Import) for a spreadsheet or a migration from another CRM.

Scan card (Contacts → Scan card) photographs a business card and creates the contact from it, with a greeting drafted automatically. Limited by plan and monthly quota, because unlike everything else in this chapter it costs us money per use.

My network imports contacts between organisations you own — if you run more than one organisation in CRM City, you do not have to type the same person twice.

The API and connectors create contacts from your website, your shop, or anything else you connect. Chapter 11.

2.8 Files

Contacts and companies can hold files. Uploads are stored privately and served through time-limited signed links, not public URLs.

Telegram media and inbound email attachments land here automatically — if someone sends you a photo on Telegram, it ends up on their record without you saving anything.

2.9 Finding people

Global search sits in the top bar everywhere and searches contacts and companies in one pass. Two keystrokes to any record.

Focus mode is a different thing and is covered in chapter 3 — it narrows the whole dashboard rather than jumping to one record.

2.10 Sending identities (business cards)

Account. A business card is a sending identity: a label, a context and a display name. One person can have several — "Personal", "Pastor", "Marketing" — and pick which one an email goes out as.

They are also printable, as actual digital business cards.

You need at least one before the email composer will send anything, because the composer asks who is writing, not just what.

What to read next

Chapter 3 — Attention. That is where the records in this chapter start doing something for you rather than sitting there.