Understanding Attio's data model

To start using Attio, you only need to understand a few key concepts. These form the foundation of Attio’s data model.

A data model might sound complicated, but it's really just a way to visualize, organize, and show connections between data. When you make a spreadsheet or jot down a categorized to-do list, you’re modeling your data.

Attio models your data. It allows you to organize, structure, and connect it in whichever way that suits your business, and then use your data to build business workflows and processes.

Attio’s data model has four main components: objects, attributes, records, and lists. Getting familiar with these concepts and how they appear in your workspace is key to fully benefiting from Attio.

Objects

An object is a framework or blueprint for how you’re going to store, organize and display your data inside Attio. It’s the equivalent of a table in a spreadsheet, which has named columns and rows with data inside, organized exactly the way you desire. Objects are the fundamental building blocks of Attio.

In Attio, there are two standard objects enabled by default: People and Companies. These objects organize and present data about the people and companies you’ve interacted with.

In this example, we’re looking at the Company object page. This shows every single company we’ve ever interacted with.

Attio also has three other standard objects that you can enable. The most important one to know about right now is Deals, which shows data about sales deals in your pipeline.

We also have Workspaces and Users objects, which are for software businesses with product-led growth (PLG) motions. They organize and display data about how users are using their software and the workspaces they’ve created.

Finally, Attio allows you to create custom objects for tracking any type of data you need. This is something that sets us apart from other CRMs, and something we’ll discuss more in the next Attio 101 article.

Attributes

Attributes tell you what type of information each piece of data is in Attio. They’re the equivalent of column titles in a spreadsheet.

For example, looking at the Companies object in this example, Company, City, Foundation date, and so on are all attributes.

Notion, San Francisco, 2016, notion.so, and 1K-5K are the actual data points of each attribute (the equivalent of a “value” in a spreadsheet).

Attributes in Attio are categorized into two types: object attributes and list attributes.

Object attributes define the type of information each piece of data represents within an object, acting similarly to column titles in a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, list attributes serve the same purpose, but for data specific to a list you've created. We'll discuss these distinctions deeper in another article.

Records

A record represents a company, person, deal, or anything else you’re tracking in Attio, and contains a set of attributes that may or may not have data associated with them. It is the equivalent of a row in a spreadsheet.

In this case, looking at the Company object, the data points you see in this row about Notion come together to form a record: San Francisco, 2016, notion.so, and 1K-5K.

They are labeled with the attributes of City, Foundation date, Domains, and Employee range.

Records are also visualized in kanban cards:

and in record pages:

Lists

In Attio, besides filtering and sorting records on an object page, you can also create lists.

A list is a customizable grouping of records. It allows you to organize your records in any way you choose and add data about them without altering the original records. This is great when teammates have different tasks. With lists, you can build specific business processes around your data.

For example, in this customer onboarding list, we have both object attributes (Description, Employee Range and Last interaction) and list attributes (Owner, Stage), the latter of which are only in this list.

However, even though the data is contained to this list, it’s still connected to the underlying record. Any data from a list attribute will be associated with an object record, appearing in the list section of a record page.

On this record page, you can see that the value of Followed up for Stage is visible in the record page in the lists section of the right sidebar. Any attribute changes or activity in a list related to the record are also listed in the activity feed.

This makes lists an incredibly valuable feature, because it allows you and your team to analyze, organize and keep track of customers as they see fit, without interfering with one another’s workflows or data.

Up next

Next, we’ll dive deeper into understanding objects, the fundamental building blocks of Attio.