# Companies A Company is the organisation a person belongs to, and several people attach to one. It exists so that facts about the organisation — the account, the terms agreed with it, the deals in its name — are not copied onto each individual and then quietly disagree. `companies.py` owns the record; the people, deals and cases that mention it stay owned by their own services. - **Status:** Available - **Audience:** both - **In the app:** #/companies, #/relationships - **Last verified:** 2026-09-10 - **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/companies/ ## What the record is for Two questions are answered by having the record at all. The first is *who else do we deal with here* — the buyer's colleague who joins a thread in month three should not arrive as a stranger. The second is *what did we agree with this organisation*, which is a fact about the business and outlives any individual who happens to work there. So the split is not cosmetic. A person carries what is true of the human: the identities they answer on, their stage, what Connect remembers about them. A other carries what is true of the business as a whole, and the people hang off it. ## Attaching people 1. Open the person and set the company link. - Result: The person appears on the organisation, and its context is available wherever that person is being answered. 2. Add the second and third colleague the same way. - Result: They share the organisation without sharing identities, memory or stage — those stay individual, because they are individual. 3. Move somebody who has changed employer. - Result: Their history stays with them. The old employer keeps what happened while they were there; nothing is rewritten retrospectively. > **Note** A shared mailbox — accounts@, support@ — usually belongs to the organisation rather than to a human. Attaching it to one human means a reply from the finance team is filed against somebody who never wrote it, and a [merge](/docs/relationships/merging/) later cannot untangle that. ## What companies do not own **Conversations** — Threads and calls belong to the person who took part in them, and reach the organisation only through that person. **Memory** — Memory tiers are workspace, channel, endpoint and contact. There is no organisation tier — an instruction that applies to everybody there goes at the workspace tier or against each contact. **Autonomy** — Autonomy scopes are contact, endpoint, channel and workspace. A rule cannot be set at that level; the narrowest useful scope is the contact. **Lifecycle stage** — Stage is a property of the relationship with a human, moved by `move_stage`. Companies do not progress through the stages on anybody's behalf. Those four absences are worth knowing before you plan around them. The usual request — *hold every reply to this customer for approval* — is met by setting autonomy on the mailbox or on each contact, not by a company-level switch, which does not exist. [What Connect may do](/docs/autonomy/) has the scope ordering in full. ## When companies are the wrong record - **A one-person supplier.** An organisation row with exactly one person in it, forever, is bookkeeping rather than structure. Nothing breaks if you skip it. - **A prospect list.** An organisation discovered by research is a prospect until somebody deals with it; see [/docs/prospects/](/docs/prospects/). - **A department.** Splitting one customer into six companies scatters the very history the record exists to hold together. - **A duplicate you meant to merge.** Two companies for one organisation are a data problem; two people for one human are the problem [duplicate detection](/docs/relationships/duplicates/) proposes a fix for. ## Questions ### Do companies have their own timeline? The timeline is assembled per person by `timeline.py`. What the record gives you is the list of its people and the work in its name, which is the route to each of those timelines rather than a merged one. [The customer timeline](/docs/relationships/timeline/) explains what an assembled view can and cannot include. ### If I delete a company, what happens to its people? They keep existing — the link is a link, not ownership. They lose that shared context, which is visible immediately in the relationship summary and in what a new colleague's first message is answered with. ### Can Connect create an organisation record on its own? Records can be created through the Assistant and through the ordinary flows, and a business reached through prospecting arrives with what research supported. What is never invented is commercial content about it: a price, an SLA or a warranty Knowledge does not support is refused and escalated — see [safe sales](/docs/sales/safe-sales/). ## Related - [Relationships in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/) - [People](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/people/) - [Customer 360](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/customer-360/) - [Duplicate detection](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/duplicates/) - [What Connect may do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/) - [Prospecting in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/) ## What this page is based on - `docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md` §5 — relationships and CRM - `docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md` §5 and §6 — autonomy scopes and memory tiers - Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)