Contacts & businesses

For: Sellers · Cypress Managers

The CRM is the platform's book of people and companies. A contact is a person; a business is the company they belong to; a deal is a conversation with one or both about a specific outcome. Everything else — tasks, notes, calls, emails — hangs off those three.

Each seller organisation has its own book, and Cypress has a platform book of its own. The two never mix.

Records enter the book one by one from the grids — or by the spreadsheet-load via CRM Import, which matches against what you already have instead of duplicating it.

Addresses

A business keeps locations — one per place it operates from, each with a ZIP, state, city and street. Type the ZIP first and the state and city fill themselves; anything you already typed is left alone. Which lot a car sits on decides transport cost, which is why this is a list and not a field.

A contact has an address of their own, on the same ZIP-first pattern. Most people are reachable through their company, but not all are: a consumer or a direct relationship has no company to inherit a location from.

Working the book in bulk

The Businesses grid carries the facts you filter and group on: location, tags, fleet size and GMV. Group by state, fleet size, owner or source and each group header carries its count and its summed GMV — "how many in Texas, and what are they worth" answered on the header row. Filter to one state from the toolbar.

Select rows — a whole group at once from its header checkbox — and the bulk bar offers Tag and Export. Tagging adds and removes in one pass (removal ignores case), so "tag these forty West Coast" and "take Q3-push off the ones that closed" are one gesture. Bulk tagging deliberately does not count as activity: labelling a thousand records must not reorder a book sorted by what happened recently. Contacts have the same Tag action.

Contacts

A contact is a person with an email address. Beyond the obvious fields — name, phone, title, company — three things do real work:

• Lifecycle — where they stand with you: Lead, Engaged, On platform (they have an account), Active, Dormant. It is the spine of every audience filter and every analytics cut.
• Owner — the person on your team responsible for them. Assignable from the grid or the record.
• Tags — free labels, exactly like vehicle labels: filterable in the grid, and visible on the row.

A contact who joins the platform is converted, which links their record to the organisation they now belong to. The CRM record stays: the history of how they arrived is not something to throw away the moment they sign up.

Businesses

A business is a company — the fleet operator, the dealer group, the municipality. It carries what you need to qualify it:

• Locations — one or many, each with city and state
• Working hours — per day, with a timezone, and a closed flag
• Qualification — fleet size (as a range), the brands they run, and annual GMV
• Website, industry, owner, tags

Two tabs make it a working record rather than a filing cabinet:

• People — the contacts who work there. Link an existing contact, draft a new one, or remove the relationship without deleting anyone.
• Deals — every deal open or closed with this company, addable and removable in place.

A business that joins the platform is linked to its organisation, and the badge on the record says On platform from then on.

The timeline

Every record carries a timeline of what has actually passed between you: notes, calls, emails, meetings, and the field changes that matter. A business timeline includes its own interactions and its people's — which is the honest answer to "what has happened with Acme", since a call with Acme's GM is a thing that happened with Acme.

Logging an interaction asks when, the outcome, then what happened and any notes — in that order, because when and how it went is what you remember first.

Ownership and access

• A seller sees only their own book. A record from another book returns the same "not found" as one that never existed, so ids cannot be probed.
• A Cypress Manager sees the platform book, and every seller's, with an Owner column saying which is which.
• A CM acting for an organisation sees exactly that organisation's book — no wider.

Deleting

Contacts and businesses can be deleted, in red, behind a confirmation that names what goes with them — notes, interactions, tasks and change history included, so nothing is left orphaned in the database.

Records already on the platform are different. A company with inventory, deals and users is not something to delete from a CRM screen; that is an administrative decision about the organisation itself, and it belongs in Admin.

Business rules

• A contact belongs to at most one business at a time; moving them is one action, not a delete and a re-create.
• Both records must be in the same book to be linked — the API refuses the cross-book case rather than silently doing nothing.
• Lifecycle, owner and tags are the three fields the rest of the platform reads. Marketing audiences, analytics cuts and Cedar's insights all key on them.