Contacts in TatvaCRM — overview

Updated 31 May 2026·7 min read

Complete overview of the Contacts module in TatvaCRM. What a contact is, every field on a contact record, how ownership and visibility work, what you can do with a contact, and how contacts link to companies, deals, and activities.

Contacts are the people your business knows — current customers, past customers, prospects you’ve qualified, bankers, vendors, referral partners. This page explains everything Contacts can do in TatvaCRM: every field on a contact record, how ownership and visibility work, what each action does, and how contacts link to the other modules.

New to the concept of a contact?

Start with What is a Contact? in CRM Basics. This page assumes you already understand the concept and want to know how it works in TatvaCRM specifically.

Where to find contacts

Contacts live in the Contacts page on the left menu of your workspace. The default view is a sortable, filterable table — each row is one contact, each column is a field. You can also switch to:

Kanban view — grouped by lifecycle stage (Subscriber / Lead / Opportunity / Customer / Evangelist), useful for sales pipelines
Calendar view — grouped by next follow-up date, useful when you’re working through scheduled outreach
List view — compact, more rows per screen, useful for bulk operations

What fields does a contact have?

Every contact has these built-in fields out of the box. You can also add custom fields specific to your business — see Custom fields on contacts.

Identity

Field	Type	Notes
First name	Text (up to 100 characters)	Required
Last name	Text (up to 100 characters)	Required
Salutation	Text	Mr / Mrs / Ms / Dr / Prof
Job title	Text (up to 100 characters)	e.g. “Founder”, “CFO”, “Branch Manager”
Department	Text (up to 100 characters)	e.g. “Underwriting”, “Procurement”

How to reach them

Field	Type	Notes
Email (primary)	Email	Validated automatically
Email (secondary)	Email	Optional second email — useful when business and personal emails are both relevant
Phone	Phone	Office number. Defaults to `+91` if no country code given. Stored in international format internally.
Mobile phone	Phone	Drives WhatsApp and SMS routing. Same auto-formatting as above.
LinkedIn URL	URL	Up to 500 characters
X (Twitter) handle	Text	Up to 100 characters

What happens when you save a phone number

TatvaCRM cleans up phone formatting automatically. If you type 9876543210, it gets stored as +91 98765 43210. If you type (080) 4555-1212, it gets stored as +91 80 4555 1212. WhatsApp links, SMS dispatchers, and contact-match reports all use the cleaned international format. You don’t have to think about it.

Address

Address line 1 and 2, city, state, country (ISO-2 from picker), pincode. The country picker uses standard codes (IN for India, US for United States, etc.) so reports group correctly. Address can be left blank for B2C contacts where you only need phone and email.

Lifecycle and ownership

Field	Notes
Lifecycle stage	Where this contact is in your relationship. Default values: `Subscriber`, `Lead`, `Opportunity`, `Customer`, `Evangelist`. Edit these per workspace.
Lead status	Optional secondary status — useful when one lifecycle stage has multiple sub-states.
Owner	The team member responsible for this contact. Controls visibility (see below).
Source	Where the contact came from — referral, website form, event, cold outreach.
Company	Link to a Company record. One contact links to one primary company; people who work at multiple companies can be linked to more.
Tags	Free-form labels for ad-hoc grouping. Examples: “BFSI”, “VIP”, “introduced by Patil”.

Who can see which contacts?

TatvaCRM uses a two-axis visibility model. Each user has both:

A role — defining what actions they can take (read, add, edit, delete, export)
A visibility scope — defining whose contacts they can see

The three visibility scopes:

Scope	The user sees…	Typically used for
`own`	Only contacts where they are the owner	Individual sales reps
`team`	Contacts owned by anyone in their team	Team leaders, line managers
`everything`	Every contact in the workspace	Owners, Admins, Sales Ops, RevOps

The five built-in roles ship with sensible defaults: Owner and Admin see everything, Manager sees their team, Member and Viewer see their own. You can change this on custom roles — see Roles and permissions.

Contacts with no owner are easy to miss

If a contact has no owner — for example, after a bulk import where you forgot to assign one — it’s visible only to users with everything scope. Your sales reps on own or team scope won’t see it. The bulk-import flow has an Assign owner step for exactly this reason. Don’t skip it.

What can I do with a contact?

The Contact detail page (clicking any contact) lets you:

Edit any field, including custom fields
Log an activity — note a call, an email summary, a meeting, a WhatsApp exchange
Create a task — add a follow-up with a due date
Send an email — directly from TatvaCRM, with the conversation logged automatically
Attach files — quotes, contracts, identity proofs, photos
Link to a company — connect the person to the organisation they work for
Create a deal — open a revenue opportunity against the contact
Add tags — for ad-hoc grouping
Merge with another contact — when you discover duplicates
Soft-delete — see below

What does “delete” actually do?

Deleting a contact in TatvaCRM is a soft delete. The record moves to a hidden state with a 30-day grace period — you can restore it from the Recycle Bin (Settings → Recycle Bin). After 30 days, the record is permanently removed by an automatic cleanup process.

This protects you against accidental deletions. The most common scenario: a team member accidentally deletes a customer record instead of a duplicate, and nobody notices for a week. With soft delete, it’s a click to restore. Without it, you’d be re-entering data from memory.

Bulk operations on contacts

Select multiple contacts using the checkboxes on the table view, then use the bulk actions menu:

Bulk update — change a field value across all selected contacts (e.g. assign 50 imported contacts to a specific owner)
Bulk delete — soft-delete multiple contacts in one go
Bulk tag / untag — add or remove tags on many contacts at once
Bulk export — download as CSV / Excel
Bulk import — see Bulk import (CSV)

Bulk operations require the right permission — contacts.delete for bulk delete, contacts.export for bulk export, etc. Members on a free tier may not have all bulk permissions by default.

How contacts link to other modules

The Contact sits at the centre of several relationships:

Module	How it links
Companies	One contact → one primary company (B2B contacts). Can also have secondary company links.
Deals	Many deals can belong to one contact over time. The contact’s deal history shows on the detail page.
Tasks	Tasks can be created against a contact directly (“Call Mr Mehta about working capital top-up”).
Activities	Every interaction logged on the contact’s timeline. Calls, emails, meetings, notes.
Leads	A Lead converts into a Contact. The conversion is one-way and creates the linked records.
Files	Documents you attach to the contact live on its Files tab.

Example: Rajiv at Pragati Capital

Rajiv’s workspace has around 1,400 contacts. Here’s how they break down — note how owner, tags, and lifecycle stage are used to organise them:

Active borrower clients (120) — owner = the responsible RM, lifecycle stage = Customer, tagged by sector
Past borrower clients (340) — owner = original RM, lifecycle stage = Customer, tag dormant
Banker contacts (280) — owner = the senior partner, tag banker, linked to bank Companies
NBFC and AIF contacts (120) — similar to bankers, different tag
CA referral partners (180) — owner = Rajiv himself, tag referral-partner

When Sneha (West RM) opens the Contacts page, her team visibility scope shows her: her own active borrower clients, plus the borrower clients of the South RM Vinod (they share the “Borrowers” team), plus the active borrower clients she inherited from her predecessor. She doesn’t see bankers (owned by the senior partner) or CA referrals (owned by Rajiv). That’s by design — she doesn’t need to.