In brief: Net Net has no deactivate state for contacts today, so Delete is the only removal action, and there is no restore control afterwards.

Applies to: Anyone whose role includes deleting contacts.

See also: Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records explains what is actually being removed, and Why Some Things Can't Be Deleted: Archive, Retire, Move covers the wider pattern Contacts sits outside of.

Contacts has one removal action today, and it is Delete. There is no separate deactivate or inactive state for a Company or a Person in Net Net right now. So the honest guidance is this: if you want a contact out of the way but not gone, leave the record alone. Delete is for records that should never have existed, not for relationships that ended.

Delete lives in the ⋮ menu on any Company or Person row, and in Select Mode for several at once.

The question people are really asking

Most people arrive here with a specific problem. A contact at a client has left. A company you worked with two years ago is not coming back. You want them out of the way without erasing what happened.

The instinct is to look for a deactivate toggle, and there is not one yet. What there is instead is a straightforward choice about whether the record should exist at all.

Keep it. The contact stays in your Contacts list. Every Job and Quick Task that ever pointed at them keeps pointing at them. Nothing about your history changes. The only cost is a row in a list. That relationship between a Company and the work it is attached to is described in Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type.

Delete it. The contact comes out of your Contacts list, and there is no restore control to bring it back.

For a client relationship that simply ended, keeping it is almost always right. A company you have not worked with since 2024 costs you nothing sitting in a list you search rather than scroll.

Why Contacts is the exception

Almost nothing in Net Net is really deleted. Teammates are deactivated. Jobs are archived. Service Types are retired. Logged time moves with the task it belongs to rather than being destroyed. The whole pattern is set out in Why Some Things Can't Be Deleted: Archive, Retire, Move.

Contacts is one of only two places where delete is real and permanent, and that puts the responsibility back on you rather than on a confirmation dialog. Everywhere else the product will stop you from destroying something a report depends on. Here it will not, so decide before you confirm.

What Delete actually does

Deleting a Person

The Person comes out of your Contacts list, out of the Individuals group if they were in it, and out of the People shown under their Company. What that grouping means is covered in Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records.

Confirm the action and it happens. There is no undo control in Contacts, so treat it as permanent from your side.

Deleting a Company

The Company comes out of your Contacts list.

It does not delete the People at that company. Those Person records remain in your workspace. If you intended to remove the people too, you have to do that separately, and you should do it deliberately rather than assuming a company delete took them along.

Deleting several at once

Select Mode is where bulk delete lives. Turn it on, tick the rows you want, and use the delete control that appears in the header. Companies and People are handled separately, so a mixed selection gives you a control for each.

The confirmation tells you what you are about to remove. Read the count. After a search it is easy to have more selected than what is currently on screen. See Navigating Contacts: Grouped View, Search, and Select Mode.

When Delete is the right call

Delete is correct for records that are wrong, not for relationships that are over.

Good reasons to delete:

• A duplicate created before the email rule caught it
• A test record from setting up the workspace
• A company added with a typo in the name
• An import that brought in rows you did not want

Poor reasons to delete:

• A client you no longer work with
• A person who left their job
• A long list you want to tidy for its own sake

That second group is what a deactivate state would exist for, and until there is one, leaving the record in place is the option that costs you nothing and protects the history.

Who can delete contacts

Deleting contacts is permissioned separately from viewing and creating them. If you do not see a delete option in the ⋮ menu or in Select Mode, your role does not carry it, and that is by design rather than a fault. See User Roles Explained: Owner, Admin, Lead, and Member.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I deactivate a contact instead of deleting them?

Net Net does not have a deactivate or inactive state for contacts today. The available action is Delete. If you want a contact out of the way without losing anything, the right move is to leave the record where it is. Search makes a large directory perfectly manageable.

Is deleting a contact reversible?

Treat it as permanent. There is no restore control in Contacts. Once you confirm, the contact is out of your lists and you cannot bring it back from the Contacts screen. That is why deletion belongs to wrong records rather than ended relationships.

Does deleting a Company delete the People at it?

No. The People remain in your workspace. Deleting a Company removes only the Company record. If you want the people gone too, delete them first, then the Company, so you do not end up with people you cannot easily find.

A client stopped working with us. Should I delete them?

No, keep them. The value of a contact directory is historical, and old clients are exactly the records you look up when you need to understand old work. A dormant company in a searchable list costs you nothing.

Why is delete permanent here when nothing else in Net Net is?

Because a contact is a directory entry rather than a measurement. Teammates, Jobs, effort, and classification labels all feed calculations, so Net Net protects them by deactivating, archiving, or retiring instead. Contacts has no such protection, which is exactly why the guidance here is to keep rather than remove.

How do I delete several contacts at once?

Turn on Select Mode, tick the rows, and use the delete control in the header. Companies and People are handled separately. Check the count on the confirmation before you accept it, because a selection made during a search can include more than what is visible.

Why can't I see a delete option?

Because your role does not include deleting contacts. Viewing, creating, importing, and deleting contacts are permissioned separately in Net Net, so the control is simply not shown to roles that do not carry it.

What should I do about duplicate contacts?

Delete the duplicate, keep the record with the history on it. Duplicates are the clearest legitimate use of delete. Going forward, the unique email rule on People prevents most of them from being created in the first place.

Related articles

The reason deleting is rarely the right answer comes down to how contact records are structured, which Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records explains, and to the wider referential rule in Why Some Things Can't Be Deleted: Archive, Retire, Move. If your list feels cluttered, try the search and grouping tools in Navigating Contacts: Grouped View, Search, and Select Mode before removing anything, and if the problem is duplicates from a bad file, Importing Contacts from CSV or Excel: Step by Step shows how email matching prevents most of them next time.

Updated on: 08/04/2026