Working with records

A record is one entry of an Object, and an Object is a kind of record your team defines. You get to records by clicking an Object in the Objects group of the left sidebar, not through Settings. Each row in that group opens one list, and each line in that list is one record you can open, fill in and hand on.

Fairgreen Golf Co. defined two Objects of its own. Sample requests holds one record per sample asked of a factory.

Fabric trials holds one record per fabric a mill sends in for testing, so the wool Portside Mills sent in March is a single fabric trial. The examples on every page in this section use those two.

What is an Object? is the setting-up half of the feature, the part an admin does once in Settings › Objects. This is the other half, the one everybody does every week. You do not need to have built anything to use these pages: if an Object is already in your sidebar, everything here applies to it.

Why keep this in Tideswell rather than a spreadsheet?

Because a row in a spreadsheet is on its own, and a record is not. A record can point at the supplier it came from and the task somebody is doing about it, carry the person accountable for it, show which stage it has reached, and keep the conversation and the history of every change on the record itself.

That is the difference you feel on a Tuesday morning. Fairgreen used to answer "where did that trial get to" by asking the one person with the sheet open. Now the answer is on the record, and it is the same answer for everyone looking at it.

What do you actually do with records?

Five things, and each one has a page below. You log a new record, find the handful that matter this week, narrow a long list down to a question worth asking, show where a record has got to and who owns it, and tie it to the work around it.

• Log one and change it. The form is built from that Object's own fields, so it looks different for Sample requests than for Fabric trials. Records are edited in place, so there is no edit mode to remember to leave. See How to add and edit a record.
• Find one. Every Object has a single list, and almost every job starts there. See How to find and open your records.
• Ask the list a question. Once it runs to hundreds of rows you stop reading it and start narrowing it: which sample requests are still open, which fabric trials came from one mill. A narrowed list can be named, kept and shared. See How to search, filter and save a view.
• Show where it has got to. A record carries a stage, such as Requested, With factory, Received, and an owner, the person or team accountable for it. Both take a couple of clicks, and both are what make a list readable at a glance. See How to move a record through its stages and set an owner.
• Connect it. A record is rarely the whole story: the sample request has a task against it, the fabric trial has a spec document, and both point at a supplier. See How to link a record to work, and see what points at it.

When is a task the better home?

Use a task instead when what you are describing is a piece of work with a person and a date on it, as in "Priya chases Portside Mills by Friday". Tasks have assignees, due dates, priorities and a board built around them. A record is the thing that work is about, so most of the time you want both, joined together.

Two more everyday choices. When you want to ask a question or note a judgement rather than change a value, leave a comment on the record, which is How to comment on a record and see its history. And when the thing you want does not exist as an Object at all yet, that is a build rather than a day-to-day job, so start at What is an Object?.

What do you need to be able to do this?

Access is granted per Object, so being able to open Sample requests tells you nothing about whether you can open Fabric trials. Each Object carries four dials: View, Create, Update and Archive. Holding one does not give you the others, which is why you can sometimes read a record and find no Save button.

Anything you cannot view is left out of your sidebar entirely rather than shown locked, which is why a colleague's link sometimes opens a padlock rather than a list. How to work out who can do what in your workspace walks you through working out which dial you are short of, and an admin raises it in Who can see and edit an Object. Every page in this section says which of the four it needs and points back here rather than repeating it.

Where to start

Read How to find and open your records first, because the list is where everything else begins. Then How to add and edit a record for logging and changing them.

After that the pages stand alone and you can take them as you need them: filtering and saving a view, stages and owners, links, then comments and history.