# Company

A **company** is the record of an organisation your business deals with: the customer, the supplier, the prospect's employer. [People](/docs/glossary/person/) attach to it, and what is true of the firm lives here rather than being repeated on everyone who works there. Your own business is not a company record — it is the [workspace](/docs/glossary/workspace/).

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/companies, #/data
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/company/

## What belongs on the organisation

The test is whether the fact survives the person. Payment terms, the trading name, the registered address, which office serves them, an account that must never be quoted a discount — all of that stays true when your usual contact moves on, so it belongs to the company. That a particular buyer prefers to be telephoned belongs to the person.

Getting this split right is what makes staff turnover survivable. A new contact at a known customer inherits everything the company record holds without anyone re-explaining it, and inherits none of the previous contact's personal preferences, which would be wrong to apply to them. The reverse case matters just as much: a note that this buyer dislikes being telephoned should not survive them, and it will not, because it never belonged to the firm.

## Where companies appear

| Where | What it is doing there |
|---|---|
| The Companies screen | The list of firms, with their people |
| A [relationship](/docs/glossary/relationship/) | The company half of the connection, beside the person half |
| [Prospects](/docs/prospects/) | An organisation research found, before it is anyone you deal with |
| An [opportunity](/docs/glossary/opportunity/) | Who the deal is with |
| The Data grid | One of the record sheets, editable in a spreadsheet-like view |

> **Note** The Data grid is a view over the same records, not a second store. Every change made in it goes through the service that owns the record, so editing a company there is the same operation as editing it on its own screen — and it is not a way to write something the service would refuse.

## Four things a company is not

**Your own business** — That is the workspace: the isolation root that owns every record including this one. The single most common misreading in this vocabulary is *company* meaning yours. It never does.
**A [person](/docs/glossary/person/)** — Conversations belong to people, not to firms. Mail arrives from a human at an address, and it resolves to a person who happens to be attached to a company.
**A [prospect](/docs/glossary/prospect/)** — A prospect is an organisation or person that research turned up and that you are not yet dealing with. Becoming a company you deal with is a real transition with evidence behind it, not a status flip.
**A deal** — An [opportunity](/docs/glossary/opportunity/) is one commercial pursuit and it closes; the organisation record outlives every deal with it, won or lost.

One consequence worth stating plainly: because a company is not the workspace, nothing about a company record is shared between businesses. Two workspaces that both deal with the same firm hold two independent records, and neither can see the other's — the isolation rules make no exception for the fact that it is the same one.

## Questions

### Do I have to create a company before adding a person?

No. People exist on their own, and many will never be attached to an organisation. Attach one when there is something true of the organisation you want to keep in a single place.

### What happens to a company's history when everyone there changes?

It stays with the company. New contacts inherit what the record holds and none of the previous people's personal preferences, which is the split the two records exist to make.

### Can two workspaces share a company record?

No. Records are scoped to one workspace by three independent enforcements, so two businesses dealing with the same firm keep two separate records.

## Related

- [Person](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/person/)
- [Relationship](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/relationship/)
- [Workspace](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/workspace/)
- [Relationships in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/)
- [A spreadsheet view that is not a second database](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/grid-over-services/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §4 — companies.py, people.py, crm.py
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §9 — the Data grid over 13 sheets
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §3 — workspaces is the root