What is an Object?

An Object is a kind of record your team defines. Tideswell arrives knowing about tasks, purchase orders, suppliers, customers and stock. An Object is how you add the things your business tracks that nobody could have shipped for you: repairs, sample requests, fabric trials, press loans, store visits, quality checks.

You meet the word in two places. Objects is an area in the left menu, with one row for each Object you can see. Settings › Objects is where an admin builds them.

What does an Object give you?

An Object behaves like any other part of Tideswell. Define one called Repair, plural Repairs, and the Objects area of the menu gains a Repair row, with an icon you can choose. That row opens a list titled Repairs, with a New Repair button and a record for each repair.

Each record carries the fields you decided it should. It can link to the supplier and the purchase order it relates to, move through statuses your team named, and gather comments, an owner and a history of who changed what.

Who can see and change the records is a setting of its own. The information stops being something one person keeps in a file and becomes something the business holds.

Why not just use a spreadsheet?

Because a spreadsheet is where most of this starts, and a spreadsheet cannot connect to anything.

Fairgreen Golf Co. tracked warranty repairs in a shared sheet for two years. The sheet knew a customer's name and a fault, and that was the end of it.

It could not say which mill wove the fabric that failed, because the mill lived somewhere else. Nobody could be kept from reading the customer's address. Nobody could see at a glance which repairs were still open.

As an Object, each of those is ordinary. A repair links to the supplier it came from, covered in How to link one Object to another. Who can open it is a setting, covered in How to set who can see and edit an Object.

Each repair also moves through statuses your team named, such as Received, With the mill and Returned, covered in How to set up the stages a record moves through.

And "which fabric fails most" becomes a filter on the list rather than an afternoon of sorting. The sheet itself does not go to waste: its rows can come straight in, as How to import records from a spreadsheet shows.

When should you create one?

An Object earns its place when the thing you are tracking has most of these:

• You have many of them. One-off information belongs in a document.
• Each one has a life. It arrives, something happens to it, it finishes. That shape is what How to set up the stages a record moves through exists for.
• More than one person touches it. If only you ever look at it, a spreadsheet is less work and nobody else is waiting on it.
• It relates to something Tideswell already knows about, such as a supplier, a product or a purchase order. This is where an Object pulls ahead of a spreadsheet.
• You want to ask questions across all of them. How many are open, which supplier sends the most, how long they take.
• People outside the team need to send them in. A customer reporting a fault or a store asking for samples can fill in a public form that lands as a record, covered in How to let people outside your team fill in a form.

Good candidates at a brand like Fairgreen: Repairs, Sample requests, Fabric trials, Press loans, Store visits, Production runs, Quality checks.

When is something else the better fit?

Three things look like Objects and are better served elsewhere.

• A piece of work somebody has to do is a task. Tasks already have assignees, due dates, priorities and a board. If what you are describing is "somebody needs to do this by Friday", use a task.
• Something you write rather than fill in is a document. Objects are made of fields with answers in them. A brand guideline or a meeting note is prose.
• Something Tideswell already ships should stay where it is. Suppliers, purchase orders, customers and stock arrive with logic built around them. Use How to choose between a built-in record and your own Object to check before you build.

You can still shape the built-in ones. Settings › Terminology gives them your own words, covered in How to use your own words for Tideswell's records. Settings › Custom fields adds your own boxes to a supplier, covered in How to add your own field to a supplier.

Do you need to be an admin?

To build or change an Object, yes. Settings appears only for admins of the workspace, so Settings › Objects is an admin's job.

To use one, no. A new Object opens to every member, and who can see and edit its records is changed on Settings › Permissions, covered in How to set who can see and edit an Object. How to work out who can do what in your workspace explains how a person's role turns into what appears on their screen.

Read this section in order

The pages below run from deciding whether you need an Object at all, to running one your team relies on.

Start with How to choose between a built-in record and your own Object to check that what you want does not already exist. Then read How to plan your fields before you add them before you build: a few of the choices you are about to make are fixed once you save them.

The build itself is How to create an Object, then How to add a field and pick its type. Three kinds of field have more to them: How to set up choice lists and reference numbers, How to link one Object to another and How to build a field that works itself out.

Then set the statuses a record moves through with How to set up the stages a record moves through, and decide who sees what with How to set who can see and edit an Object. To let people outside the team send records in, use How to let people outside your team fill in a form. For records your team types the same way every time, set up How to set up record templates.

Months later, How to rename, reorder or retire an Object covers renaming an Object, changing its columns and archiving one you have finished with. Once records start arriving, Working with records covers the day to day.