Companies

A company is any organisation you deal with, whether a client, a supplier, a partner, an internal department or something else. Contacts, interactions, engagements and project links all hang off the company record.

What a Company Holds

Field	What it means
Name	The company’s name. Required
Relationship	What the company is to you: client, supplier, partner, internal or other
Status	Where the company stands: lead, active or past
Contact cadence	An optional number of days that replaces the relationship’s default contact rhythm for this company
Industry	Free text
Website	The company’s web address
Tags	A list of labels you choose
Notes	Free text

The CRM gives each company an ID when it creates the record. Claude uses the ID behind the scenes, so you refer to companies by name.

Adding a Company

Tell Claude about the company in a sentence.

Add Harbour Design Studio as a lead. They're a design agency, website
harbourdesign.example.

A company you add without a status starts at lead. Adding a contact with a company name that the CRM does not know also creates the company, at status lead.

Relationship

The relationship says what the company is to you, and it decides the two things below.

• The default engagement type. A supplier’s engagements default to purchase, a partner’s to partnership, and every other relationship’s to sale. See Engagements.
• The expected contact cadence. Clients default to 30 days, partners to 60 and suppliers to 90, while internal and other companies have no cadence. See Stale Clients and Contact Cadence.

You can leave the relationship unset. The CRM then works it out from the company’s project links. Any link marked client makes the company a client. Otherwise the most frequent link value wins, and a company with no links reads as other. The company profile shows the result and says whether you stored it or the CRM derived it from links.

Note

A company with no relationship set and no project links reads as other, and an other company is never stale. Set the relationship on companies you want the CRM to watch for lapsed contact.

Status

Status	Meaning
lead	A prospect, of any relationship
active	A company you work with now
past	A company you no longer work with

Only active companies can be stale. Leads belong in the pipeline, and nobody expects contact with past companies.

Older databases may hold a fourth status, dormant. The CRM no longer writes it, and adding or updating a company with that status returns an error. The company profile marks any company still at dormant so you can move it to active or past. A search can still find these companies.

The Company Profile

Ask about a company, and Claude opens its full profile.

What's the state of play with Harbour Design Studio?

The profile shows the sections below. Each section appears only when it has something in it.

Section	What it shows
Summary table	Status, relationship and its source, contact cadence and its source, the stale reading, industry, website, tags, notes and ID
Contacts	Each person’s name, role, email and preferred channel
Recent interactions	The 20 most recent interactions with anyone at the company
Engagements	Each engagement’s name, type, stage, value and expected close, with commitments to the company where you buy from it
Linked projects	Each linked project’s name, status, task progress, last worked date, relationship and department, read live from the project register
How these projects relate	Any project relations among the company’s projects

Finding Companies

Ask Claude to find companies by name, industry or anything in their notes. You can narrow the search by status or tag.

Which of our active companies are in hospitality?

Each result shows the status, the relationship when you have set one, the number of contacts, open engagements and the date of the last interaction. A search returns up to 20 companies unless you ask for more.

Changing a Company

Tell Claude what changed, and it updates the record.

Harbour Design Studio is now an active client.
Set the contact cadence for Northfield Print to 14 days while the new
system goes in.

To return a company’s relationship to the derived value, or its cadence to the default, ask Claude to clear the field.

Merging Duplicate Companies

Two conversations can add the same company under slightly different names, which leaves part of the history on each record. A merge moves everything from the duplicate to the record you keep, then deletes the duplicate.

1. Ask Claude to merge the duplicate into the company you want to keep.
2. Claude first runs a dry run, which reports what would move and changes nothing.
3. Read the dry run, and compare the two profiles if you are unsure which record to keep.
4. Confirm the merge, and Claude runs it again with the confirmation that applies it.

Caution

A confirmed merge deletes the duplicate company and cannot be undone, so read the dry run carefully before you confirm it.

The merge moves contacts, interactions, engagements and project links in one step. It follows these rules for the fields on the company itself.

• The kept record’s values win. That includes its relationship and contact cadence.
• Empty fields fill from the duplicate. Nothing on the duplicate is lost where the kept record had a gap.
• Tags combine. The kept record ends up with the tags of both.
• Notes combine. Where the notes differ, the duplicate’s notes are added with a merge marker.
• Status takes the later stage. active wins over past, and past wins over lead.

A project linked to both records keeps one link. The kept record’s link survives, empty fields fill from the duplicate’s link, and the duplicate’s link notes are added with a marker.

Contacts move across and are never combined. If both records held the same person, the kept company now has two contact rows for them, and you decide which one to keep.

What You Cannot Do

PRIMA CRM 1.6.1 has no action that deletes a single company. The merge is the only action that removes a company record.