As you use Ontraport, your account fills up with information about your business: your leads and customers, your emails, your pages, your forms. Once you know how that information is organized, you'll always know where to look.
Think of your account as a file cabinet. Each drawer holds one kind of information. In Ontraport, those drawers are called objects. Contacts is one object. Companies is another. Click Contacts, and you see every contact in your account, listed in the Contacts collection. Click Companies, and you see your companies.
Your messages, pages, forms and more each have their own collection too, so every kind of asset has a place to live.
Inside each object are records. A record is like a file folder. It holds everything about one specific person or thing. In the Contacts collection, each row is one contact. Click it, and you open that contact's full record.
Records store their data in fields. A contact might have fields for purchase dates, products purchased, or job title. Fields are often the power behind your follow-up, both manual and automated. Fields differ by object. First and last name make sense for a person, but not for a business. So company records have their own fields, like Name and Industry. Inside a record, fields are grouped into sections, and sections are grouped into tabs on the left side of the record.
Records also keep history. On a contact's Contact Information tab, the contact log records each interaction with that contact, and the automation log shows the actions your automations took. The Purchases tab holds their purchase history and transactions.
Records in different objects can be linked. A company record, for example, lists its contacts under Related Contacts, so you can move between a company and the people who work there.
Every account starts with Contacts. Prebuilt objects, like Companies and Deals, come as apps you turn on. You can also create your own custom objects, like Pets for a veterinarian or Projects for a contractor. Both use a Dynamic CMS package on your account. Each object gets its own collection of records.
So: objects are the drawers, records are the folders, and fields and logs hold what's inside. To find anything, pick the object first, then open the record. Next up: viewing your data in Table View.