Your CRM Should Know What a Vehicle Is

Contacts and deals cover most of the work. Not all of it. Custom record types let a workspace track the other things it actually runs on — vehicles, contracts, properties, machines — and link them to everything else.

Every business has a thing it tracks that is not a person and not a sale. An appraiser has vehicles. A property manager has units. A maintenance business has machines. An agency has contracts that outlive any single deal. In most CRMs, those things end up as a custom field on a contact, a note on a deal, or — most often — a spreadsheet next to the CRM.

The spreadsheet works until someone asks a question that spans both. Which clients have a contract renewing next quarter? Which vehicles came through the same insurer? The answer is in two places, and joining them is a manual job.

Give the thing its own record

Under Settings → Fields → + Record type, a workspace can define its own record types. Each gets a name in singular and plural, the field that names a record — a licence plate, a file number, an address — an icon and a colour. Then it gets its own section in the sidebar and a full list page: search, field filters, sortable columns, CSV import and export.

Opening a record shows a drawer where every field is edited in place. The title renames with a click. A History tab shows each change with who made it, so the record carries its own audit trail.

Links are the point

A record type on its own is a nicer spreadsheet. The value comes from linking it to the rest of the CRM. Link a vehicle to the contact who owns it and to the deal for the current job, and the contact now shows every vehicle they have brought you. Link contracts to companies and the company record becomes the place to see what is running, what has ended and what renews next.

Because the link works in both directions, nobody has to remember which side to start from. The person handling the deal sees the vehicle. The person looking at the vehicle sees its history of jobs.

If a spreadsheet sits next to your CRM, it is usually a record type that has not been given a home yet.

Build it in this order

Record types are easy to over-design. A short sequence keeps them useful:

  1. Start from the spreadsheet you already keep. Its columns are your fields. Its first column is usually the naming field.
  2. Create the type and import the CSV. Check a handful of records against the source before you delete anything.
  3. Add the links last. Connect each record to the contact, company or deal it belongs to, and let the backlinks appear on the other side.
  4. Save a view. The filter your team runs every week — "contracts renewing in the next 90 days" — becomes a shared view in one click.

Formulas and conditions

The same field tools work on record types as on contacts and deals. Formulas calculate values from other fields, rollups summarise linked records, and conditional fields only appear when they apply. A contract can show its remaining term without anyone working it out; a vehicle form can hide the fields that only matter for commercial vehicles. And where the information is a location rather than a value, a diagram field stores marks on a drawing.

Automations can start on field changes and upcoming dates too, so the renewal date on a contract can trigger the reminder instead of someone's memory.

The CRM does not have to be shaped like a sales tool. It can be shaped like your business — and if your trade has an industry template, most of the shape is already there.

See it on screen: Built for your business on our features page lets you type your trade and watch its fields and stages snap in.