Restricting what people see

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By default everyone in your firm sees the whole CRM. Where that is not right, an object, a list or an individual record can be restricted to chosen people and teams.

Only owners and admins can restrict things. It is managed under Settings → Access and permissions, and on the records themselves.

The three levels

An object — nobody outside the access list sees that type of record at all. The object disappears from their sidebar.

A list — the list is hidden, though the records on it may still be visible through their object.

A record — one company or one person is hidden from everyone not on its list.

Everything on a record follows it

This is the part that matters, and it is why restriction is worth trusting.

Restricting a record restricts everything attached to it: its notes, its tasks, its emails, its timeline entries. There is no path by which someone without access sees the record's contents through another screen, because the rule is applied in the database rather than by each page remembering to check.

Teams

Access can be granted to a team rather than naming people one at a time. Teams are managed in the same place.

Use teams wherever more than two or three people are involved. Granting a team means one change when somebody joins or leaves, instead of revisiting every restricted record.

Owners always see everything

Owners are exempt from every restriction.

That is deliberate, and it explains a rule elsewhere: only an owner can make somebody else an owner. If an admin could promote themselves, they could grant themselves the exemption, and restriction would mean nothing.

Worth knowing when deciding who holds the owner role.

You cannot lock yourself out

When you restrict something, access is granted before the restriction is applied, so there is no moment where it exists with nobody able to see it.

When to use it

Restriction is for the genuinely sensitive: a proprietary process, a sensitive relationship, something under a tighter NDA than usual.

It is not a tidiness tool. A CRM where people cannot see most of it stops being useful, and the usual result is that work moves into spreadsheets where nothing is tracked at all. Restrict the exceptions, not the default.

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