What is a Company?

Back to Rajiv

You met Rajiv Sinha on the What is a Contact? page. He runs Pragati Capital Advisors in Pune — twenty-five people, eighty active mandates, helping mid-market businesses raise corporate debt across term loans, project finance, working capital, and real estate funding.

Take one of Pragati’s clients — Bharati Steel Rolling Mills, a mid-sized steel rolling and processing business headquartered in Aurangabad, Maharashtra. They’ve been a Pragati client since 2017. Nine years.

In those nine years, the deal count is impressive: four separate debt rounds totalling about ₹182 Crore raised:

• 2017: ₹35 Cr term loan for plant expansion (PSU bank consortium)
• 2019: ₹22 Cr enhanced working capital line
• 2022: ₹85 Cr project finance for a new cold-rolling line
• 2024: ₹40 Cr top-up working capital after a new auto-OEM contract

And in those nine years, the people Rajiv’s team talks to at Bharati Steel have changed:

• Mr Suresh Kothari — founder, promoter, MD. The one constant since 1994. Rajiv has known him personally for nine years.
• Karthik Kothari — Mr Kothari’s son, joined as Director Strategy in 2019 after his MBA from ISB. Increasingly the decision-maker.
• Ms Anjali Deshpande — CFO since 2023. Came in from Tata Steel. Sharp, demanding, picks every clause apart.
• Mr Pradeep Sharma — the previous CFO who handled the 2017, 2019, and 2022 mandates. Left in 2023 for a competitor. Still on good terms.
• Mr Vivek Patil — Finance Manager, day-to-day point of contact for documentation, banker liaison, repayment schedules.

Five different people over nine years. One Company. 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?

Rajiv clearly needs Companies — every borrower client is an organisation with multiple decision-makers (promoter, CFO, finance manager, often a banker too). Aditya at StoreWorks needs Companies too — he sells to retail chains, where Bandhej Lifestyle is a Company and Nikhil is a Contact at that Company, with the ops manager Priya as another Contact at the same Company.

Why keep Companies separate from Contacts?

Three reasons. All three matter.

1. People move on. The relationship stays.

When Mr Pradeep Sharma — Bharati Steel’s CFO through the 2017, 2019, and 2022 mandates — left for a competitor in 2023, Pragati didn’t lose Bharati Steel as a client. They just had a new CFO to build a relationship with: Ms Anjali Deshpande. Because the Company record kept the entire mandate history of the prior six years, Sneha (Pragati’s RM for the West zone) could sit Ms Deshpande down on her second meeting and walk her through every banker Pragati had placed deals with, every term sheet ever negotiated, every clause Bharati Steel had pushed back on historically. Continuity preserved. If everything had been attached only to Mr Sharma’s Contact record, Pragati would have lost six years of context the day Sharma quit.

2. One company has many people you talk to.

At Bharati Steel today, Sneha talks to Mr Kothari about long-term strategy and the family’s appetite for risk. She talks to Karthik about new platform ideas and ESG-linked financing options. She talks to Ms Deshpande about every clause in every term sheet — Deshpande personally negotiates them. She talks to Mr Patil about day-to-day documentation and repayment schedules. She talks to Bharati Steel’s bankers at HDFC, ICICI, and BOM through their own RM channels too. Four-plus different conversations, four-plus different people, one Company.

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

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

When Rajiv asks “How much has Bharati Steel paid us in fees over the years?”, the answer should be one number, not four numbers added up from four different people’s records. When he asks “Is our relationship with Bharati Steel strengthening or weakening?”, he wants to see total mandates over time, total fees, response times, recent mood. At the Company level. The Company record makes that one question answerable.

Bharati Steel, broken down

Here’s how Bharati Steel looks inside Pragati’s TatvaCRM:

What lives on a Company record?

For Pragati’s use:

• Identity — registered name, GSTIN, PAN, CIN, registered office address, plant addresses.
• Relationship — client since, total fees earned, total debt raised, current credit rating, sector and sub-sector classification.
• Linked Contacts — every person at the Company you talk to, their role, their seniority, whether they’re primary / secondary / dormant.
• Linked Deals — every mandate ever discussed, open or closed.
• History — every meeting, site visit, banker pitch, term sheet revision — rolled up across all Contacts.
• Owner — the RM at Pragati who manages this account. Sneha owns Bharati Steel.
• Custom fields — for debt advisory: sector, last debt raised, current banker, credit rating, refinancing windows, board composition.

A Monday morning in TatvaCRM

It’s a Monday in August. Rajiv opens TatvaCRM at 8:15 in his Pune office. The Companies page is the first thing he checks.

He filters: “active clients I haven’t personally met in 90 days, where total fees earned crosses ₹1 Cr.” Eight companies show up. He scans the list — most are healthy, growing accounts. But one catches his eye: Sundaram Auto Parts, a Chennai-based Tier-2 auto components manufacturer. Last personal meeting 104 days ago. Seven-year client. Pragati has helped them raise ₹120 Crore across three rounds. Last mandate closed in 2024. The Activity timeline shows: silence since March.

Rajiv clicks the Company. He scrolls down to the Contact list and sees the CFO has been replaced — Mr Sundaram’s long-standing CFO Mr Ganesh retired in April, replaced by a Ms Kalpana Vijayan. Pragati’s relationship manager for the South zone hadn’t met her yet. There’s an Activity note from June — a phone call where Mr Sundaram had mentioned wanting to add a new line for EV components and expected to need debt by Q3.

Rajiv blocks a flight to Chennai for Wednesday. He’ll do a meet-and-greet with Ms Vijayan personally, then catch up with Mr Sundaram about the EV financing. By Friday, Pragati is mandated for the next ₹65 Crore round. ₹85 Lakh in expected fees. Pure existing-relationship business, almost lost to a CFO transition that nobody had caught.

Five years ago, Pragati ran on a senior associate’s Excel sheet. CFO changes slipped past. Promoter-level conversations got lost in WhatsApp chats. The week Rajiv learned that a former ₹30 Crore borrower had just done their third round of debt through a competitor — because nobody at Pragati had called in two years — was the week he signed up for TatvaCRM.

Common confusions, cleared up

“One client has plants in 4 states. One Company or four?”

Usually one. The borrower entity is the legal entity that signs the loan documents — that’s your Company. Multiple plants are shipping addresses or operational sites under one Company. Unless each plant is a separately registered subsidiary with its own CIN, treat them as one. Use plant-name tags if you need plant-level reporting.

“The client is part of a large business group with related companies. How do I track that?”

Each related company is a separate Company record (different CIN, different GSTIN, different financials). Use a “Group” tag — e.g. Kothari Group — across all related companies so you can roll up reports at the group level. The same Contact (Mr Kothari) can be linked to multiple Companies in the same group if he’s involved at multiple entities.

“The borrower is a proprietorship. Add them as a Contact or a Company?”

Both. Even a proprietorship has a business identity — registered name, GSTIN (often), separate bank account, separate tax filing. Add the proprietor as a Contact and create a Company for the firm. Loans get sanctioned to the firm, not the individual.

“My client doesn’t have a GST number — small SME. Still a Company?”

Yes. GST registration kicks in above certain turnover thresholds. Plenty of smaller SMEs operate below it. Add the Company anyway — registered name and address, leave GSTIN blank, update later if they register.

“A promoter has stakes in five different companies. Do I add him five times?”

No — one Contact (the promoter), five Companies (one per business). The same Contact can be linked to multiple Companies in TatvaCRM. Mark his “primary” company as his main operating business, and the others as secondary. Group them with a shared identifier if there’s a holding structure.

“A banker at HDFC is a key contact for several of our deals. Where do they sit?”

Contact, with HDFC Bank as the Company. Bankers are not customers, but they’re critical relationships — track which RMs you place deals with, what sectors and ticket sizes they prefer, which colleagues at HDFC they backfill when they’re on leave. Filter your Contact list by Company = HDFC Bank to see your full HDFC relationship map.

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.