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Clients and contacts
How a company record and the people who sign in relate to each other.
Orbinly keeps two things apart that are easy to mix up: clients and contacts. Understanding the difference makes everything else (billing, portal access, plan limits) make sense.
| Client | Contact | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A company (or person) you do work for and bill | An individual at that company who can sign in to the portal |
| Holds | Projects, invoices, files, messages, notes, tags and custom fields | A name, email, phone, role and portal access setting |
| Counts toward your plan limit | Yes: plans limit the number of clients | No: the limit is on clients, not on the people at them |
| Where to find it | CRM → Clients | CRM → Contacts, and on each client's page |
How they fit together
- One client can have many contacts, for example a founder, a finance person and a project manager.
- The first contact you add becomes the company's owner contact, with full access. They can invite their own teammates from the portal.
- A person can be a contact at more than one of your clients. They use a single login and switch between companies. See Switching between companies.
- Everything a client sees is scoped to their company. Nothing from another client is ever visible.
Where each thing lives in the admin
- CRM → Clients: the list of companies.
- CRM → Contacts: every person across all clients.
- CRM → Deals: prospects you haven't won yet. See Deals pipeline.
- CRM → Archived: clients you've archived. See Archiving and deleting clients.
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