As you've started to learn about Insightly, you will have come across the term "objects." Objects are the types of records you'll add to Insightly - all of your business's most important information lives here.
The image below depicts a typical sales process. Each object plays a role in moving from prospective customer to closed deal. This is just one example of how objects can be connected to each other.
The standard objects in Insightly are:
So what are the differences between these objects?
Contacts
Contacts are people who are directly associated with your business. Whether they are someone you work with, someone you are selling to, or someone you provide services to, contacts are integral to your Insightly experience.
Leads
Leads are your potential clients and contacts. They are the people who are at the very beginning of your sales process. You may have spoken to them before or received their contact information, but they're not quite in your sales pipeline yet. Once they move into a sales opportunity phase, you'll convert them to a contact.
Organizations
Organizations are the companies that you do business with. You can link contacts to an organization to keep a convenient, organized list of its employees or members. An organization's contacts can be found in the Related tab of the record.
Opportunities
Opportunities are used to monitor your sales process. This is where you can keep a record of what the value of a sale is, why a contact or organization is interested in your business, and the timeline of the opportunity. You can also use pipelines to track each step along the way. Once you've closed the deal, you can convert your opportunity into a project.
Projects
Projects are used to work on that closed sale and complete your deliverables. It's most common to manage projects with pipelines, but you can also use milestones instead. Projects are for work to be done after a sale or for your in-house processes and goals.
Tasks
Tasks are the smaller assignments that make up your work for sales opportunities, project management, or anything else you do from day to day. When they're linked to another record, like an opportunity or project, they will appear in that record's Activity tab. With tasks, you can create a manageable list of things to do for you or any member of your team.
Tasks make it easy to keep track of how a project is progressing. You can assign due dates and link them to other records. Users can also create tasks that aren't part of any project if they simply want to remember to do something later.
Events
Events are for keeping track of important dates. They can be connected to your Insightly calendar and linked to your other records. Once they are linked to a record, they can be found in the Activity tab.
Emails
Emails are for saving copies of incoming and outgoing emails from a separate inbox or mail application. Insightly can automatically import emails and can link them to related records. They can be found in the Activity tab.
Notes
Notes are messages you can add to a record. They can be used to remember details for future reference or important information about the record. They can be found in the Related tab.
