Customers
The timeline
Notes, calls, meetings and email against a person — and why a call with nothing written down is still a record worth keeping.
One timeline serves a contact, a company and a deal. An entry names all three where they are known, so a company's history is one read rather than a walk through its people.
A call needs no summary
Every other kind of entry needs some text — a note with nothing in it is nothing. A call is the exception: *rang them, eleven minutes, no answer* is a complete record.
Why the exception is in the code
Demanding a written summary before a call can be saved is precisely how calls stop being logged at all. The person who has just spent eleven minutes on the phone is the one least likely to write a paragraph about it, and the log that results is not a shorter log — it is an empty one.
An unanswered call is recorded as readily as a conversation. A system that only stores the calls that connected cannot answer *how many times have we tried this person*, which is the question that decides whether to keep trying.
Tasks are not work items
*Ring Bob on Tuesday* is a CRM task: a title, a due date, an owner, and what it is about. It is deliberately not a work item.
| A work item has | A CRM task has |
|---|---|
| A project, and cannot exist without one | A contact, a company or a deal |
| A key from that project's gapless sequence | No key |
| A rank in the organisation-wide backlog | A due date |
| A state, an estimate, a sprint | Done, or not done |
What it would cost to merge them
A work item cannot exist without a project, so sales would need a fictional one — and that fiction leaks into every project picker, consumes the key sequence, and drags four hundred follow-up calls into the burndown and velocity figures for delivery work. The precedent here is attendance and time entries, which are kept apart for the same kind of reason.
The states are derived from one date and one nullable completion, exactly as releases and milestones are: overdue, due, open, done. No status column to drift.