What is a Company?

Meet Vikram

Vikram Reddy runs sales at Vasundhara Textiles, a Hyderabad-based cotton fabric supplier. His family started the business in 1989 — three generations now. They mill fabric in Sircilla, dye it in Vijayawada, and ship it to distributors across the southern half of India. Eighty active distributors across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana, and Kerala.

Take one of those distributors — Reddy & Sons Distributors in Vijayawada. They’ve been buying from Vasundhara since 1998. Twenty-eight years.

In those twenty-eight years, the people at Reddy & Sons have changed:

• Mr Venkat Reddy (Sr) founded it. Vikram’s father did the deals with him over the 1990s.
• Mr Krishna Reddy took over from his father in 2009. Vikram has known him personally for fifteen years.
• Karthik Reddy, Krishna’s son, started running day-to-day operations in 2022 after his MBA from XLRI. He is the future of that relationship.
• Surya, the procurement manager, is who actually places the weekly orders. He’s been there since 2019.

Four different people. One company. Twenty-eight years of buying. Across that time the people changed, the relationship continued. And that is exactly why CRMs treat Companies as a separate thing from Contacts.

B2B vs B2C — when do you actually need Companies?

Here is the simple test: do you sell to organisations, or to individuals?

Vikram clearly needs Companies. Aditya at StoreWorks clearly needs Companies (he sells to retail chains — Bandhej Lifestyle is a Company, Nikhil is a Contact at that Company, and Bandhej’s ops manager Priya is another Contact at the same Company). Rohan at the coaching centre mostly does not — he sells to individual families, and the family unit is loose enough that Companies would feel forced. Meena at Coastal Diagnostics does — every referring doctor’s clinic is a small Company in her CRM.

Why keep Companies separate from Contacts?

Three reasons. All three matter.

1. People move on. The relationship stays.

When Surya at Reddy & Sons leaves for a competitor in 2027, Vikram doesn’t lose Reddy & Sons as a customer — he just has a new procurement manager to build a relationship with. Because the Company record kept the entire ordering history of the last six years, the new procurement manager can see what Reddy & Sons used to buy, what discounts they got, what their delivery preferences are. Continuity is preserved. If everything was attached only to Surya, Vasundhara would lose six years of context the day Surya quit.

2. One company has many people you talk to.

At Reddy & Sons, Vikram talks to Mr Krishna Reddy (the owner) about strategy and long-term volumes. He talks to Karthik (the son) about new product lines and ideas. He talks to Surya (the procurement manager) about this week’s order and delivery. He even talks to the accountant about pending payments and credit notes. Four different conversations, four different people, one company.

A CRM that only had Contacts would force Vikram to either (a) attach the order history to one random person, or (b) duplicate it across four. Both are wrong. The Company record holds the shared history. The four Contact records hold the individual conversations.

3. You want to see the whole picture per company.

When Vikram asks “How much business has Reddy & Sons done with us this year?”, the answer should be one number, not four numbers added up from four different people’s records. When he asks “Are we slipping with Reddy & Sons?”, he wants to see total order trends, total payment delays, total complaints — at the company level. The Company record makes that one question answerable.

Reddy & Sons, broken down

Here’s how Reddy & Sons looks inside Vikram’s TatvaCRM:

What lives on a Company record?

For Vasundhara’s use:

• Identity — registered name, GSTIN, PAN, billing address, shipping addresses (often multiple).
• Relationship — customer since, total business value, credit limit, current outstanding, payment behaviour score.
• Linked Contacts — every person at the company you talk to, their role, their seniority.
• Linked Deals — every revenue opportunity ever discussed, open or closed.
• History — meetings, calls, visits, emails — rolled up across all contacts at the company.
• Owner — the salesperson who manages this account at your end. Vikram himself owns Reddy & Sons. Junior reps own smaller distributors.
• Custom fields — for textile distribution: territory, distributor tier (A / B / C), exclusive territories, payment cycle.

A Monday morning in TatvaCRM

It’s a Monday in March. Vikram opens TatvaCRM at 9 in his Hyderabad office. The Companies page is the first thing he checks.

He filters: “distributors I haven’t spoken to in 30 days, in South Tamil Nadu.” Eight companies show up. He scans the list — most are small B-tier distributors. But one catches his eye: Coimbatore Cotton Co. Last conversation 47 days ago. Twelve-year customer. Used to order ₹6 Lakh every month. Last six months: nothing.

Vikram clicks the company. The Activity timeline shows the last call — November 18, his rep Ramesh had a conversation about “price competition from a new mill in Erode.” Then nothing. Vikram scrolls back further. ₹6.2 Lakh in August. ₹5.8 Lakh in September. Then a drop to ₹1.8 Lakh in October. Then silence.

Vikram picks up the phone himself. Mr Manickam, the owner of Coimbatore Cotton, picks up after three rings. They speak in Tamil. Yes, the Erode mill is offering prices Vikram can’t match on bulk grey fabric. But — Manickam is genuinely embarrassed by how the relationship has lapsed. He still buys premium dyed fabric from a Bengaluru competitor only because Ramesh stopped calling.

Vikram blocks a flight to Coimbatore for Wednesday. By Friday, Coimbatore Cotton is back ordering ₹3 Lakh worth of premium dyed fabric per month, with a commitment to revisit bulk grey orders in the next quarter.

Two years ago, Vasundhara didn’t have a CRM. Coimbatore Cotton would have just quietly drifted away over six more months. The week Vikram lost a ₹40 Lakh/year distributor to a competitor — purely because nobody noticed the order pattern changing — was the week he made his father agree to TatvaCRM.

Common confusions, cleared up

“One distributor has three branches in three cities. One Company or three?”

Depends on who pays the bills. If all three branches buy under one GSTIN and one legal entity, it’s one Company with three shipping addresses. If each branch is a separate registered company with its own GSTIN, they’re three Companies — even if the owner is the same person. Track them separately because financially they are separate, and group them at reporting time with a tag like “Reddy Group.”

“The buyer is just a one-person business — proprietorship, no employees. Add them as a Contact or a Company?”

Both. Even a one-person business has a business entity behind it — a proprietorship, a registered name, a GST number. Add the person as a Contact and create a Company for the proprietorship. It feels like overkill for one person, but the day they grow to three people, you’ll be glad you set it up correctly from day one. The alternative — restructuring later — is much more painful.

“My customer doesn’t have a GST number. Still a Company?”

Yes. GST registration is required only above certain turnover thresholds. Plenty of real businesses below ₹40 Lakh annual turnover operate without GST. Add the company anyway — fill in legal name and address, leave GSTIN blank, and update it the day they register. Don’t use GST status as the test for whether something is a Company.

“The distributor is registered as ‘Krishna Reddy,’ same name as the owner. Where’s the line between the person and the business?”

Even proprietorships have a separate identity from the proprietor. The Contact is “Krishna Reddy,” a 54-year-old man. The Company is “Reddy & Sons Distributors” (or “Krishna Reddy & Co.,” whatever the registered name is) — a business with a GSTIN, an office, a vehicle, employees, a phone line, a bank account, and a balance sheet. The day Krishna retires and Karthik takes over, the Contact changes. The Company doesn’t.

“A buyer owns five different companies. Do I add him five times?”

No — one Contact (the buyer), five Companies (one per business). The same Contact can be linked to multiple Companies in TatvaCRM. Use the “primary company” field to flag which is his main one and tag all five with a Group identifier so you can roll up reports.

What to read next

• What is a Deal? — how revenue attached to companies gets tracked.
• Company vs Contact — which one? — the dedicated cheat-sheet.
• The sales funnel — how Companies fit into the bigger picture.