Core Concepts: Records, Lifecycle Stages, and Ownership

A few minutes spent understanding StretchCRM's data model pays off every day you use the product. Once you know how the objects connect and what each key field means, every view in the app becomes predictable.

The object graph

StretchCRM is built from six connected record types:

Company — an account (an organization you do business with).
Contact — a person, usually belonging to a company.
Deal — a revenue opportunity, attached to a company and a contact.
Ticket — a support request, attached to a company and a contact.
Activity — a logged event (call, email, meeting, note, stage change) attached to any of the above.
Task — a to‑do with a due date, attached to any of the above.

Think of companies and contacts as the who, deals and tickets as the what you're working on, and activities and tasks as the what happened and what's next. Every deal, ticket, activity, and task can point back to a contact and/or a company, which is how StretchCRM builds a complete timeline for each record.

Lifecycle stages

Both contacts and companies have a lifecycle stage that describes where the relationship is in its journey. Typical values are:

Lead — a new, unqualified relationship.
Opportunity — an active sales conversation.
Customer — someone who has bought.

Lifecycle stage is about the relationship. It's different from a deal's pipeline stage, which is about a single opportunity. A contact can be a Customer while also having a new deal sitting in the Discovery stage — the two describe different things.

Lead status and lead score

Contacts also carry a lead status (for example new, connected, or active customer) that captures the state of your outreach, and a lead score — a 0‑to‑100 number expressing how promising the lead is. Companies have a lead score too.

You can set lead score by hand. StretchCRM can also suggest scores through its governed Customer Intelligence passes — but those suggestions are advisory and audited, and are never written silently onto your records. (See Customer Intelligence: Governed Signals and Dry‑Run Scoring.)

Every contact has a consent status — for example subscribed, unsubscribed, or unknown. This is your record of whether the person has agreed to be contacted, and it's the field you filter on before any outbound marketing. Keeping consent status accurate protects both your deliverability and your compliance posture.

Ownership

Most records carry an owner (an owner email). The owner is the teammate responsible for that relationship, deal, ticket, or task. Owners are what make your CRM answerable to "who's handling this?" — and they're the natural way to slice reporting by rep or by success manager. Assign an owner as soon as you create a record.

Record status

Records have a status that controls whether they're active:

Contacts and companies default to active. The dashboard counts only active records.
Deals default to open. A deal is considered closed when it lands in Closed Won or Closed Lost.
Tickets default to open and are considered done when Resolved.
Tasks default to open and can move to in progress or complete.

Keys and amounts

A few mechanical details worth knowing:

Keys are generated for you. Each record has a stable internal key (like contact-ava-...). You rarely need to set it — StretchCRM derives one from the name or email.
Money is stored precisely. When you type a deal amount like 18500.00, StretchCRM stores it to the cent so totals never drift. Currency defaults to CAD.
Email is unique and lowercased. Two contacts can't share an email, which keeps your database clean.

A worked example

Here's how the concepts combine for a single account:

Company: Summit Operations — lifecycle stage Customer, owned by your success team.
Contact: Nora Hill, Director — lifecycle stage Customer, lead status active customer, consent subscribed, lead score 94.
Ticket: "Dashboard access and reporting request" — attached to Summit and Nora, in the Triage stage of the Support Pipeline.
Activity: A logged email recording your reply.
Task: "Grant reporting access" due tomorrow, owned by the success manager.

Every one of those records points back to the same company and contact, so Nora's timeline tells the whole story in one place.

Tips

Separate lifecycle from pipeline in your head. Lifecycle stage describes the person or account; pipeline stage describes a specific deal or ticket.
Fill in owner and consent early. They're the two fields you'll most wish you had set later.
Let StretchCRM manage keys. Overriding them by hand is rarely necessary and easy to get wrong.

FAQ

Can a contact exist without a company? Yes. Company is optional on a contact — useful for sole proprietors or unknown employers. You can attach a company later.

If I change a company's lifecycle stage, does it change its contacts? No. Lifecycle stage is set per record, so you control company and contact stages independently.