Companies
A corporate client rarely sends you one person. The office manager books the Christmas party, someone in marketing books the product launch, and a third name appears on the invoice. In 1pm each of those people is their own contact, which is right: they have their own email, their own phone, their own history with you. What has been missing is the thing above them. A company record is that thing.
Link a contact to a company and their leads, their bookings and their money stop being three separate stories. You get one page that says what an organisation is worth to you, who you deal with there, and which of their jobs you won and lost.
Where it is
Companies sits under Contacts in the sidebar. The list shows each company with how many contacts it has, how many bookings, what those bookings are worth and the date of the most recent one. Search matches the company's name or its email address.
Click any row to open the company's record.
Building companies from names you have already typed
Most accounts already have a few hundred company names typed into the Company box on their contacts. You do not have to retype any of them.
When you first open Companies you are offered Review labels. That lists every company name currently sitting on a contact, with how many contacts carry it. Names shared by two or more contacts come first and start ticked, because a name on several people is almost always a real organisation. Names on a single contact start unticked, because those are usually a couple or a sole trader rather than a company.
Tick the ones you want, confirm, and each becomes a company with its contacts already linked. Nothing is renamed and nothing is created for a name you leave unticked. The offer stays on the page while there are names left, so you can come back to it after adding more contacts.
Linking a contact
Open any contact and use the Company box. Start typing and matching companies appear, each with the number of people you already have there. Pick one and the contact is linked.
Typing a name that matches nothing is perfectly fine. That is the wedding couple, the sole trader, the friend of the family helping out on the day. The box takes free text, and the contact simply has no company record behind it.
If the organisation is new, type its name and choose Add "..." as a new company at the bottom of the list. The company is created and the contact is linked to it without leaving the form.
You can also work the other way round: open a company, go to its Contacts tab and choose Add a contact. The new person arrives with the company already filled in.
What is on a company record
Contacts. Everyone you deal with at the organisation, with their email and mobile. Click a name to open their full contact record. Unlink takes someone out of the company without deleting them or changing anything else about them.
Leads. Every lead from the company, won and lost, with the status it has in your Leads inbox. Leads you moved to Spam are left out. A lead joins this list when it is linked to one of the company's contacts, or to the company itself. Losses stay on the list on purpose: "why did we stop hearing from them" is a question you can only answer if the ones that got away are on the same page as the ones that landed.
Events. Every booking whose client contact belongs to the company, with who booked it. Three different people booking three parties reads as three rows under one company instead of three unrelated bookings.
Money. Bookings, booked value, paid and outstanding across the whole organisation, plus total invoiced, guest numbers and the dates of their first and most recent booking. It counts tentative, confirmed and completed bookings, the same set the Top clients report uses, and leaves out leads and cancellations.
In your reports
Two reports read the company link.
Top clients has a Group by choice: client contact, or company. Group by company and every booking made by anyone at the same organisation adds up on one row, so the three people who book your corporate work read as one customer worth the lot. A client who is not linked to a company keeps a row of their own, so nothing is hidden and the total is the same whichever way you group. The biggest change is usually the "Booked more than once" figure: three one-off clients at one company become one repeat customer.
Conversion funnel carries a By company table under the funnel, covering the same leads. It shows how many each company sent, how many were quoted, how many were won, lost and still open, the win rate and what the wins were worth. A company whose leads all reach Quoted and then stop is a pricing or follow-up problem; one whose leads never reach Quoted is being answered too slowly. Leads that belong to no company are not in that table, and the page says how many there are.
Renaming a company
The company's name is also the company name shown on each of its contacts, and that name is what appears on a BEO, on an invoice's bill-to block, in a merge field and on a crew email. So renaming a company rewrites it on every contact and lead linked to it, in one go. If a client rebrands, change the name once and everything downstream says the new name.
That is also why the name has to be unique on your account. Two companies with the same name would be indistinguishable in the picker, which defeats the point of having the record.
Deleting a company
Deleting a company deletes the company record and nothing else. Its contacts, its leads and its bookings all stay exactly where they are, and every contact keeps the company name it was showing. They simply stop being grouped together. The confirmation says which numbers are involved before you commit.
What the details are for
Beyond the name, a company holds a phone number, an email address, a website, and an Address and bill-to details block for invoicing. The email and phone are the organisation's own: the switchboard, or the accounts inbox. Each person keeps their own on their own contact record.
Internal notes are for your team. Nothing in them reaches a client, a crew member or a portal.