Managing Companies & People

The same counterparty turns up on contract after contract. If their details live only on each contract, you re-type the company name, registration number, and signer every time, and a typo on one of them quietly splits your reporting. The Contact Book keeps one record per company and per person, so you enter the details once and reuse them everywhere.

This article covers adding and maintaining those records: when to create a company versus a person, the fields each one holds, linking a person to their company, and the tags and toggles that keep the book clean.

Every entry in the Contact Book is a party: either an individual party (a person) or a legal entity (a company). It is the same kind of record, with one switch that decides which fields it carries. There is no separate “company” object, a company is a party marked as an entity.

Which type you pick changes the fields you fill in:

You choose the type when you create the contact. The type also controls which roles the contact can take on a contract and which custom attributes apply to it, so set it correctly up front.

You add contacts from the Contact Book directly, so the details are ready to reuse before you reach for them on a contract.

A signer usually belongs to a company: “Jane Doe at Acme”. You capture that relationship by setting a person’s Entity to a legal entity already in the Contact Book. On the create dialog this field is labelled “Entity to which this party belongs”; in the side panel it appears as Entity.

Open the person’s record, find the Entity field, and pick the company. The person now shows as affiliated with that entity, which keeps “who signs for whom” clear when the same company sends different signers across deals.

Click any row to open its side panel. The panel shows the contact’s fields for its type and lets you edit them in place, no separate edit screen. Changes save against the one shared record, so they appear on every contract that uses this contact.

The side panel is also where you set the housekeeping that keeps the book usable:

• Tags. Group contacts however you work, for example by region, business unit, or relationship. You can then filter the directory by tag.
• Our Party. Marks a contact as internal to your organization (the dialog asks “Is this party internal to our organization?”). Use it to separate your own entities and people from outside counterparties.
• Verified. Marks a contact as checked and trusted. Verification signals that a record is clean enough to reuse with confidence, which matters when several people are picking parties onto contracts. When two records turn out to be the same company, see Finding and merging duplicates.

Once contacts are tagged and marked, use Filter at the top of the directory to narrow the list. You can filter by Party type (Entity or Individual), Tags, Roles, Designation, a custom Attribute, or In contract(s), which is how you work through a specific slice of the book.

The reason to maintain contacts in one place is reuse. Once a company or person is in the Contact Book, you select it on any contract instead of re-entering its details, and the same record can sit on as many contracts as you need.

Each contact’s side panel includes a Contracts with this party list, showing every contract the record is linked to. It is the quickest way to see your full relationship with a company before a renewal or a new deal.

For the field types you can add beyond the built-in ones, and how they apply to individuals versus entities, see Party attributes.

• Contact Book overview
• Adding parties to a contract
• Party attributes
• Finding and merging duplicates
• Variables and tokens reference