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Contacts and companies are the two primitives that Assembly Studio’s CRM is built on. Almost every app you build will be scoped to one or the other. Knowing the difference saves you a lot of clarification during the build.

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Contacts

A contact is a person your firm serves. They have a name, an email, and an account they can sign into. When you assign work or send something to a contact, only that contact sees it in their Portal.

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Companies

Companies group contacts together. If two or three people from the same customer organization are your contacts, you can put them under a single company. Then you can scope work to the company instead of to individuals, and everyone in the company sees the same data. Companies are optional. Workspaces can run contact-only if every contact is an individual.

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Contact-level vs company-level apps

This is the most important decision the app builder asks about when you build a contact-facing app. The same app concept can work either way:
Each contact has their own instance. John’s app data is John’s; Jane’s app data is Jane’s. They don’t see each other’s.Best for: personal trackers, individual goals, one-to-one engagements.
When you don’t say, Assembly Studio picks the default for your workspace: companies if you have them enabled, contacts if you don’t. You can always override during the planning step.

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Frequently asked questions

To edit a company, click the company in the Company column on the Contacts page. A dropdown appears with a list of existing companies.Click the three dots next to the company you wish to edit (you can search for companies by typing in the dropdown).An edit modal appears where you can change the name and icon for the company.To change the icon, click the company icon in the edit modal and select an image from your device to upload a new icon.To change the name, type the new name into the Name input.After making your changes, click Save to update the company settings.
To change the profile image for a contact, click the contact on your Contacts page and the User details panel appears on the right. Hover over the profile image and you’ll see an Edit icon. Click the profile image and select an image from your local device.To change the profile image for a company, click any company field on your Contacts page. A dropdown with all companies associated with your portal appears.Click the three dots next to the company you wish to update and select Edit. The Company details panel opens. Hover over the profile image and you’ll see an Edit (pencil) icon. Click the profile image and select an image from your local device.
Currently an internal user cannot update a contact’s email directly. This is a feature on our roadmap.There are two workarounds:
  • Ask the contact to log in and click Settings > Account. On this page, the contact can update their own email address.
  • Go to the Contacts page and click the contact to open the Contact details panel. Click the three dots in the top-right of the panel and select Reset password. Reset the password, log in as the contact, and update the email address in their Settings > Account. Then log out as the contact, reset their password again from the admin dashboard, and send the new temporary password to the contact.
Foundation: offer contacts an experience that feels familiarWhen contacts sign up for your portal, it is important to offer them an experience that feels familiar and safe. We recommend that you:
  • Connect a custom domain. A custom domain makes contacts feel more secure because they are now on a URL that you own.
  • Connect a custom email domain. They will now receive their invite and other email notifications from a known sender, and email notifications are also less likely to go to spam.
  • Customize your portal. Upload your logo, set your color scheme, and add your login image.
  • Customize your apps. Disable apps you don’t need, reorder them based on importance, and update their names and icons.
  • Set up a friendly welcome message. If you have the Messages app enabled, new contacts receive a welcome message the first time they log in.
Inviting contacts successfullyYour goal should be to make all your contacts Active. Active means the contact has successfully accepted their invite and set their password. Some tips:
  • Before inviting your contacts, tell them about the invite in advance, so the email invitation doesn’t come as a surprise.
  • If the contact hasn’t accepted their email invitation in a few days, click the actions button and select Resend invite to resend the email invite. You can repeat this as many times as you like, but we recommend doing it no more than two or three times. If the first invite wasn’t accepted, you may also consider reaching out to the contact directly and walking them through the process.
  • If that doesn’t work, try a more hands-on approach. Click the actions button for the contact, select Resend invite, and copy the invite link. You can now paste this link into an email or SMS and manually send it to the contact with a customized message.
You can invite your contacts individually or bulk import them from a .csv file. See Inviting clients for creating, inviting, and importing contacts.Letting contacts self-serve sign upIf you instead want to let a user navigate to a page where they can self-serve sign up, consider enabling direct sign up.
To reset a contact’s password, click the contact to open the Contact details panel on the right. In the top-right corner, click the menu button and select Reset password.A temporary password is displayed. Copy this password and click Save, then send the temporary password to your contact.They will be able to log in using the temporary password and will be prompted to reset their password upon login.