You can add many additional custom information fields to the pages that appear in the "out of the box" version. To support these custom fields, they are organized into categories. A group of custom fields that belongs to a category is called category details or just details.

Categories are a way of specifying a particular kind of record. For example, in a Contact record of an employee, you may need to enter information about their hire date, manager, and department. To enter these details, the appropriate category, such as Employee, should be selected for that contact record. But those same details would not make sense in a Contact record for an outside vendor. For vendors, you may need other specific details instead, such as vendor type and payment methods. This can be addressed by adding the Vendor category to the contact record.

Categories control which specific sections of details are displayed on the Details sections of a record's General page. By adding or deleting categories in a record, you display or hide the associated sections of details in that record.

Note: Contact records differ from other record types, because all of the details related to categories are displayed on a Details page, not in details sections in the General page.

You might have many other categories of contacts. Categories can be structured like a family tree. For example, the Employee category might be subdivided into Manager, Non-Exempt, and Temporary categories. When you assign the Non-Exempt category to a contact record, you automatically include the parent Employee category, so that detail sections for both categories would be visible in that record.

The categories used by your organization are entered by your system administrator into a list that is then available for you to choose from when you work on Contact records, Project records, or any custom record type.

Categories and Record Types

Besides the Contact record type, categories are also used to control sections of custom fields (category details) in the Project record type, and in each custom record type.

In the Account record type, categories are used for organizing accounts, but accounts do not have custom fields associated with their categories.

The examples in this portion of the documentation have categories related to the Contact record type.

Assigning Categories

When viewing an existing record's Categories page, only the categories that are presently assigned to the record will be shown. There might be many other categories available for assignment, but they are not visible during viewing.

When editing the Categories page for a record, all of the categories that are available for assignment are shown. The categories that are presently assigned are indicated in check-boxes. You can assign multiple categories to a record.

The list of categories is structured like a family tree. Those branches that are expanded are marked by the minus icon, and those that are presently collapsed are marked by the plus icon. You can expand and collapse branches by clicking these icons.

You can assign or unassign a category by clicking the check-box next to the category name to place or remove a check mark in the box.

Note that assigning a category automatically causes any parent categories to be assigned, too. In this example, assigning Attorney to the record caused Internal to be assigned, because Internal is the parent of Attorney. It is also possible to assign a parent category to a record without assigning any of the child categories.

Set a primary category before saving as detailed in the image below.

Unassigning Categories

You can unassign a category by clicking the check-box next to the category name to remove the check mark in the box. Unassigning a child category does not automatically unassign the parent category.

Important: When you edit an existing record and unassign one of its categories, then save the record, all of the information in the category details for that category will be permanently deleted. Even if you re-assign the category the previous information cannot be recovered. Therefore you should use caution when unassigning a category.