Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records

In brief: Contacts holds two record types, Companies and People, and Individuals is simply the group where People with no Company attached appear.

Applies to: Everyone in the workspace.

See also: Adding and Editing Contacts (Including Quick Add) is how records get created, and Navigating Contacts: Grouped View, Search, and Select Mode is how the grouping behaves in the list.

Contacts holds two record types and only two: Companies and People. Individuals is not a third type. It is simply the grouping where People who have no Company attached show up. A Person moves in or out of that group by whether a Company is set on them, and nothing else. Email is what identifies a Person, which is why every Person has to have one.

You will find all of it under Contacts in the left navigation.

The two contact record types

Company

An organization. A client, a vendor, a partner, anyone you deal with as an entity rather than a person.

A Company carries its own details: name, industry, website, description, contact information, address, and social profiles. It can have any number of People attached to it, or none at all.

The Company is the record the rest of Net Net points at. When a Job names a client, it is naming a Company. See Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type.

Person

A human. Someone you email, call, or sit across from.

A Person carries a name, a title, contact information, an address, social profiles, and optionally a Company. The Company link is what puts them in a group in your Contacts list. Without it, they appear under Individuals.

There is no third record type hiding anywhere. Every contact in Net Net is a Company or a Person. Once that lands, the rest of Contacts is straightforward.

What Individuals actually is

Individuals is a grouping, not a record type.

Open Contacts and you see your Companies listed alphabetically, each one expandable to show the People at it. Below all of them sits a section headed Individuals. That section holds every Person in your workspace who has no Company attached. How that list behaves is covered in Navigating Contacts: Grouped View, Search, and Select Mode.

That is the whole rule. A Person with a Company appears under that Company. A Person without one appears under Individuals. Set a Company on them and they move up. Clear it and they move down. Nothing else about the record changes, and they are not second-class contacts in any way.

Individuals is where the freelance photographer you use twice a year lives. The referral partner. The person who introduced you to a client and does not belong to any organization you track. Real contacts, no organization, and no reason to invent a fake company just to file them somewhere.

If your Individuals group is growing faster than you expected, it usually means people are being added quickly without a company set. That is fine. You can attach a Company to any of them later by editing the Person, and they will move into that group on their own.

Email is the identity anchor

Every Person must have an email address, and it has to be unique within your workspace.

That is the single hardest rule in Contacts, and it exists for one reason: without a stable identifier, the same human turns into four records with slightly different spellings, and every report that touches contacts starts lying to you.

Email is a good anchor because it is the thing about a person that is already unique, already stable, and already known. Names collide. Phone numbers change. Titles change every eighteen months. An email address is what you actually have.

What this means in practice:

You cannot save a Person without an email.
You cannot save two People with the same email in one workspace.
Importing a row whose email matches an existing Person updates that Person rather than creating a second one.

That last behavior is the whole reason imports stay clean. See Importing Contacts from CSV or Excel: Step by Step.

Companies do not use email as an identifier. A Company is unique by name. Two companies can share a general inbox address without any trouble, but two People cannot share a personal one.

Where Contacts shows up in the rest of Net Net

Contacts sits underneath a lot of Net Net. It is quiet, and almost everything else leans on it.

Jobs name a Company as the client. That is how the work knows who it is for, and how anything client-facing groups sensibly. See Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type.

Quick Tasks anchor to either a Company or to Internal. A Client Quick Task requires a Company; a Person at that company is optional. See Quick Tasks vs Job Tasks vs My Lists: Which to Use.

Both use the same lookup control, so finding a contact feels identical wherever you are, and you can create a missing Company without leaving the screen you are on. See Adding and Editing Contacts (Including Quick Add).

Sales is coming to Net Net in Q3 2026 and is not in the app yet. When it ships, Opportunities will name a Company the same way a Job does, so the Contacts records you build now are what it will point at. The preview is in Sales Opportunities, Not a CRM: A Q3 2026 Preview.

Net Net is not a CRM

Worth saying plainly. Contacts is a directory, not a relationship manager. It holds who your clients are so that work can point at them. It does not run sequences, score leads, or manage a pipeline of touches.

If Contacts is clean, everything downstream of it stays clean. That is the entire job. For the wider argument about why agencies benefit from keeping client records attached to the work rather than parked in a separate system, read how client records streamline project tracking and growth for agencies.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many record types does Contacts have?

Two: Companies and People. There is no third type. Individuals is a grouping in the Contacts list, not a kind of record.

What is an Individual in Net Net?

A Person who has no Company attached. They appear in the Individuals group at the bottom of your Contacts list. Attach a Company to them and they move under that Company; clear it and they move back. The record itself is an ordinary Person either way.

Do I have to give every Person an email address?

Yes. Email is required and has to be unique in your workspace. It is the identifier Net Net uses to tell one Person from another, which is what keeps the same human from turning into several records. Names and phone numbers are not reliable enough for that job.

No. One email, one Person, per workspace. If two people genuinely share an inbox, pick the one who owns the relationship and record them, or use a distinct address for each.

Can a Company exist with no People attached?

Yes. A Company is a complete record on its own, with its own contact details, address, and social profiles. Attach People to it whenever you actually know who they are.

Which parts of Net Net point at Contacts?

Jobs and Quick Tasks today. Jobs name a Company as the client, and Client Quick Tasks require a Company and optionally a Person. Both use the same lookup, so the experience is the same wherever you meet it. Sales will join them when it ships in Q3 2026.

Is Contacts a CRM?

No. It is a directory. Contacts stores who your companies and people are so that work in Net Net can point at them. It does not manage the relationship, run outreach, or track a sales pipeline of touches.

With the two record types straight, Adding and Editing Contacts (Including Quick Add) is how you actually get contacts in one at a time, and Importing Contacts from CSV or Excel: Step by Step is how you bring in a list you already have. Once there are a few hundred of them, Navigating Contacts: Grouped View, Search, and Select Mode covers finding anyone quickly, and Deactivating vs Deleting Contacts (and Why Delete Is Final) covers what to do when a relationship ends. To see what all of this feeds into, Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type shows how a Company becomes the client on a piece of work.

Updated on: 08/04/2026

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