Concepts & Data Model

Businesses, collections, entries, fields, references, and lifecycles — the concepts that make up the Sonta data model.

• GuideUnderstanding the Sonta data modelSonta does not ship a fixed CRM — you build the model your work needs. This guide walks the whole model end to end: a business holds collections, collections hold entries, entries have fields, references connect collections, and lifecycles move entries through stages — while pipelines, views, agents, and your public site all work on the same records.
• ArticleBusinesses and multi-tenancyA business is the top-level container in Sonta and the boundary around everything inside it — collections, records, team, agents, and settings. You can run as many businesses as you need from one account, and nothing crosses between them: separate data, separate access, separate configuration. That separation is what multi-tenancy means here.
• ArticleCollections and entriesA collection is a container for one kind of thing — customers, orders, properties — and an entry is a single one of them. If a spreadsheet helps: the collection is the sheet, an entry is a row. You create the collections your work needs rather than fitting into a fixed set, and everything else in Sonta is built on top of them.
• ArticleFields: built-in and your ownA field is one piece of information that every entry in a collection carries: a candidate's email, a listing's asking price, a proposal's due date. Every collection has two kinds of field: a small built-in set that all collections share and you cannot edit, and the fields you add yourself.
• ArticleHow references connect entriesA reference is a field that links an entry to an entry in another collection. It stores the link, not a copy: when you read the entry, the referenced entry comes with it as it is now, so a change on one side is seen everywhere that points at it.
• ArticleStatus and publishingEvery entry has a status: draft, published, or unpublished. Status, together with an optional publishing window of start and end dates, decides whether the entry counts as published, and that is what a connected website shows. Your team sees every entry whatever its status.