Contacts permissions and states

Contacts is organization-scoped. Authenticated access to the service is followed by capability checks for contact, group, and task operations, plus owner checks for private groups.

Organization capabilities

Capability area	Typical organization access
View and manage contacts	Organization members and admins can work with people and organization records.
Manage contact groups	Organization members and admins can create groups; record-level group rules still apply.
Manage contact tasks	Organization members and admins can create, assign, complete, reopen, edit, and delete tasks.
Custom fields	Organization admin only. The page also checks contact-management capability.
Relationship types	Organization admin only.
Duplicate review and merge	Organization admin only.

A platform administrator is not automatically an organization admin. The active organization membership remains part of authorization.

Group access

Group state	Read access	Write access	Access administration
Shared group	Organization members who can view Contacts	Every reader	No per-member grant list
Private group — owner	Yes	Yes	Can add, change, or remove grants
Private group — Read only	Yes	No	No
Private group — Read and write	Yes	Yes	No

Only the private-group owner can open Manage user access. An organization admin who is not the owner can delete or merge a group, but cannot manage that private group’s access grants. Turning a private group into a shared group grants every organization member read and write access.

Deleting a group removes its assignments and group-scoped custom fields; it does not delete the contacts themselves.

Contact lifecycle

• Active people appear in All people.
• Active organizations appear in All organizations.
• Archived records move to Archived people or Archived organizations and can be restored with Unarchive contact.
• Permanent deletion removes the contact and associated CRM data for the workspace and cannot be undone.
• Duplicate merging keeps the chosen primary record, folds selected data into it, and cannot be undone.

Archive when a record should leave active work but its history may still matter. Merge only after reviewing every record in the duplicate set.

Affiliation states

Affiliations connect a person and organization and can be Current, Former, or Unclassified. The UI groups current and unclassified records separately from History. Only one current Employment affiliation without an end date can be Primary.

Role types include Employment, Founder, Board, Advisor, Representative, and Other. Custom relationship types are separate from affiliations and have administrator-defined direction and cardinality.

Task states

A task is open until Complete is selected. Reopen returns it to active follow-up. My tasks is assignee-scoped; All tasks is organization-wide.

Custom-field constraints

• Group scope cannot change after creation.
• Type cannot change after creation.
• Allow multiple values can be enabled later but cannot be disabled after it is persisted.
• Allow Kanban grouping is available only to single-value select, priority, boolean, and user fields.
• Deleting a custom field also deletes the values recorded for it.

Related pages

• Contacts overview
• Run Contacts workflows
• Troubleshoot Contacts