A person is not attached to their company

The link between a Person and a Company is a record somebody sets — on the relationship screen, in the Data grid, through the Assistant, or at the moment a prospect becomes a relationship. Nothing derives it from a mail domain, so a person who has only ever written from a free address has no company to attach to until one is chosen.

Status: Available What this means
Audience: both
In the app: #/companies, #/relationships, #/data
Last verified: 2026-09-10
Product version: 6.3.2

What the link is for#

A Company is an organisation record and several people attach to one. The link is not decoration: it is what makes a colleague's context available when a different colleague writes, what lets duplicate proposals compare two similar names, and what gives an opportunity a buyer larger than one mailbox.

Deals, cases and onboarding read the organisation, not only the individual.
A name pair that shares a company is comparable evidence for a duplicate proposal; the same pair without one is not.
A person leaving is a change of identity, not a loss of the account, when the company holds the relationship.

Where the link comes from#

Route	When it happens	What to watch
The relationship screen	A person sets the company on the record	The company must exist first, or be created in the same step
The Data grid	Bulk edit across the people sheet	Every change goes through the service that owns the record, so the audit trail is the same as a screen edit
The Assistant	Asked to attach a person to an organisation	The Assistant's rights are narrower than yours; it works through the same service
Prospect to relationship	A discovered organisation becomes a Company when the prospect is taken on	Research found the organisation; the person may still need attaching
Import	Whatever the file carried	A file with no organisation column produces people with no company, silently

There is no sixth route. In particular, no rule reads the part of an address after the @ and creates an organisation from it. That restraint is deliberate: domain inference produces a company called 'gmail' on the day somebody writes from a personal account, and once created, a wrong organisation is harder to notice than a missing one.

What Connect completed#

The Person exists, with every identity that has arrived on it.
Conversations, calls, follow-ups and deals are attached to that Person and are fully usable without a company.
Where a Company record exists, it is intact and holds whatever people are already attached to it.
Prospect research, where it ran, recorded the organisation it found as evidence against the prospect.

What Connect did not complete#

It did not invent an organisation from an address, and it did not attach a person to a company on similarity. Both are refusals rather than omissions. The practical consequences are worth stating plainly, because they are what sent you looking:

Colleague context is absent: A reply to one person will not draw on a thread with their colleague until both are on the same Company.
Duplicate proposals are weaker: Two spellings of one name with no shared company and no shared address are not comparable evidence.
Company-level reporting is short: A deal counted against a person is not counted against the organisation the person works for.

Setting it#

Search for the company first, on #/companies.
Result Attaching to an existing record is what you want; creating a second record for the same organisation is the failure this step prevents.
If it does not exist, create it with the name the organisation uses for itself.
Result Later matching works from that name, so a legal entity nobody uses in correspondence makes every future match worse.
Attach the person from either side — the person's record or the company's people list.
Result The link is one relationship; both screens are reading the same row.
Repeat for the colleagues already in the workspace, using the people sheet in #/data where there are several.
Result Bulk edits go through the owning service, so each one is audited exactly as a single edit would be.

When to escalate#

This is data rather than machinery, so almost every case is fixed from the screens above. Two shapes are worth reporting: a link that will not hold after being set and re-read, and a merge that left people attached to a Company that no longer exists. Both are defects. A person with no company, on a record nobody has ever set one on, is not.

Questions#

Why was the company not filled in from the email domain?

Because nothing does that. Domain inference is right often enough to be trusted and wrong often enough to be dangerous — a shared address, a personal account or an agency mailbox each produce a plausible organisation that is not the customer's.

Does attaching a person to a company move their history?

No. The person keeps their conversations, identities and commitments. The company gains a member, and context that reads the organisation begins including them.

Can the Assistant attach people in bulk?

It can attach people, working through the service that owns the record. For a long list the people sheet in #/data is faster and produces the same audited result.