Clients, contacts and the account lifecycle

Your CRM lives under Pipeline → Contacts. It has two tabs: Companies (the accounts you work for) and People (the humans at them). One toolbar, one status filter spanning both.

Adding accounts and people

Use New company or New person depending on which tab you are on. A company record holds a full address (street, number, box, postal code, city, country) and invoicing details (VAT regime, VAT-liable flag, payment term, language), plus registration number, legal form, rate card, payment terms and marketing consent — enough to bring a complete CRM across from your accounting system.

People carry address, website, rate card and an active flag.

One lifecycle status

Every account has exactly one status. There is no separate "stage" axis to keep in sync:

• Prospect — in your CRM, no work attached yet. This is what every new account starts as.
• Active — a real client: at least one non-archived project, a won deal, or an active subscription.
• Past — a former client you want to keep in the CRM. Dormant, not deleted.
• Archived — removed from the CRM. Lost or dead, hidden by default.

A person's effective status comes from the companies they are linked to — the most active one wins.

Promotion happens by itself

An account becomes Active automatically the moment real work attaches to it: you create a project for it, win a deal, or it gets a subscription. You never have to remember to flip the switch, and it does not matter which entry point the work came in through.

So there is no separate "promote to client" step to hunt for — attaching the work is the promotion.

Demotion is the opposite — never automatic. Moving an account to Past or Archived is always a deliberate act.

Setting a status by hand

Use the status chip on a row, or the client sheet:

• Mark as active
• Mark as past client
• Archive

A manual choice wins — it pins the account and the automatic rules skip it from then on. If you want the automation back, use Reset to automatic and the status is re-derived from the actual work.

What status actually changes

Status is mostly about what a list shows you, not about locking anything away:

• Archived accounts drop out of the pickers you use day to day — choosing a client on a project, or starting a timer.
• Prospects and past clients still appear in those pickers, so you can start work against an account before it has been promoted.
• The client-axis filters — on the planner and the project scope filter — list active accounts only, which is what keeps a CRM full of never-converted prospects from cluttering them.

Everything is always there under Pipeline → Contacts with the status filter set to All.

Per-client tabs

Open an account to find its Details, Projects, Documents, Notes, Tasks and Recordings tabs. New tasks created there are pre-linked to the client automatically.