Understanding records

What is a record?

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.

Records are visualized in the form of table rows, kanban cards, and pages.

Seeing all your records

In Attio, you can easily get a global view of every record belonging to an object. Simply click an object in the records section of the left sidebar.

For example, if we click on the Companies object, you’ll see every company in your workspace right away.

Customizing your view

One of the most powerful features in Attio is that you have the ability to create an infinite amount of views.

In Attio, a view allows you to customize how your data is displayed. You can modify a view by sorting, filtering, or selecting which attributes are shown.

Sorting and filtering changes are specific to you and won't affect your team members unless you save changes. However, adding or hiding attributes will be visible to everyone.

Let’s build out a new view of the Companies object by scratch together. Click the All Companies dropdown at the top left and select Create new view.

A dialog will pop up. Type Home view as the name of your new view and click Create view. Your view should now look like this:

You’ll notice that there is only one attribute column - Company - and nothing else. To change that, we’ll click Add attribute column so we can begin to view our data.

We’ll add Description, City, Foundation date, Employee range, Estimated ARR, and Twitter.

Filtering and sorting records

From there, we can quickly filter and sort through our records any which way. For example, let’s say we want to figure out which companies are based in San Francisco and have an estimated ARR of $100m-$500m.

Click the Filter button at the top of the page and a drop-down text box will appear. You can click through attributes individually by category, or simply type City, which will take you to the attribute you want to select. Click on that or hit Enter.

Now we need to specify the condition. In this case, we want it the primary city to be San Francisco, so we’ll make the condition Primary location > City > is > San Francisco. From there, we’ll hit the + again and add Estimated ARR > is > $100m-$500m.

Taking actions on records

From there, you can take any action you want. For example, you can Add to list, Send an email, Run workflow and more.

Record pages

Every record you see in a table or kanban view links to a record page. A record page shows all the attributes and data of a record and related data from lists.

For People and Companies objects, a record page contains every meeting, email, note, task, file associated with an entry, as well as enriched data and data from any lists the record is associated with.

When your team has their email and inboxes synced, these record pages are always up-to-date. Every individual on your team has the full context about a contact, company or deal.

Anatomy of a record page

Attio was built around the premise that every business is unique in its processes. That’s why we’ve designed record pages in Attio to be as easily configurable and customizable as possible for your business.

Here is layout for a Companies record page:

1. Record widgets. This section contains the top highlights of a record. By default, they show Strongest connection and Last email interaction.

2. Record actions. Here you can add this specific record to a list, run a specific workflow related to this record, or compose an email to send.

3. Record tabs. These tabs allow you to sort through various types of data associated with a record: in this case:

   1. Activity: A timeline of activity involving the record inside your CRM. This shows when your team first corresponded with a record, when a record is added or changed in a list, any notes created, and upcoming and past meetings based on your calendars.

   2. Emails: Attio automatically captures your team's interactions with your records. You can see every email correspondence with a contact, request access for certain emails and filter by attachment.

   3. Team (for company records) or Company (for people records): Here you can see any related relationships for a record. If you’re looking a company record, you’ll see other people on this person’s team. If you’re looking at a people record, you’ll see their associated companies.

   4. Notes: Access any notes associated with the record.

   5. Tasks: Access any tasks associated with the record.

   6. Files: Access any files associated with a record.

4. Right sidebar. Here you can see more specific details about your record, and any lists your record is on along with specific attributes. These are separated into sections. You can also see comments about the record page.

How to customize record pages

Workspace admins can customize the configuration of record pages to ensure the data most relevant to your team is easily accessible and organized.

To configure record pages for a given object, begin by selecting the ⋮ icon at the top right of the window. Select Configure page. From here, you can customize the following sections:

Widgets

Across the top of each record page under the record name and image, you can display specific attributes (data points) as widgets. Click Add widget to select the attributes whose values you want to show at the top of each record's page.

Tabs

You can also configure the tabs you want to show on each record page for an object. For standard objects, this includes things like Activity, Notes, Tasks, Emails, and Files. You can also add tabs for linked records with Team for Companies, Company for People, Associated people and Associated company for Deals, or other relationship attributes.

Once you've selected a relationship attribute, choose which attributes for the linked object you want to display on that tab, then click Save changes. The tab will show all connected records with their values for the attributes you've selected.

To configure your tabs, click Add tab and select an option. You can reorder the tabs by clicking and dragging, or by clicking the ⋮ icon and selecting Move left or Move right.

To remove a tab you’ve added, click the ⋮ icon and select remove tab. Default tabs cannot be removed.

Sections

On the right sidebar, you will find sections. There are two types of sections: a “Record Detail” section and a “Lists” section.

Record detail sections are groupings of attributes about your current record. By default, there must be always one section available.

You can rename the default section by clicking Record Details. You can edit the sections attributes by clicking on the section itself.

Adding new attributes to sections

To add new attributes, click Add attribute, and to reorder them, simply drag each one.

Additionally, you can swap an attribute for another by clicking the arrow on the right of each column. Finally, to delete an attribute, click the trash icon.

To create a new section, select Add section. To re-order your sidebar, simply drag and drop sections.

When you've made changes to the page configuration, you must click Save changes at the bottom for the new configuration to be applied.

Learn more

For detailed guides to creating and managing records in Attio, see Records in our Reference section.

Up next

Next, learn about the power of lists in Attio.