Understand organizations, branches, and contacts
The Relationships area separates **companies, locations, and people** so your CRM reflects the way business relationships actually work.
A single organization may have multiple branches and many individual contacts. Keeping those pieces distinct prevents your relationship history from becoming a collection of duplicate company names and disconnected people.
### Organizations
An **organization** represents the company or business entity itself.
Examples might include a title company, lender, signing service, law firm, settlement company, or another business you work with.
The organization is the top-level relationship.
### Branches
A company may operate through multiple offices, locations, or branches.
Branches let you keep location-specific information connected to the same underlying organization rather than creating a separate company every time you work with another office.
This is especially useful when one company sends work from several markets or departments.
### Contacts
Contacts are the individual people you actually communicate and work with.
A contact can be associated with an organization and, where applicable, a particular branch.
Keeping the person separate from the company allows you to build history with both.
You may work with the same organization for years while interacting with different escrow officers, attorneys, processors, loan officers, or other professionals along the way.
### Avoid unnecessary duplicates
When a company or contact already exists in your Relationships, reuse the existing record rather than creating another version of the same relationship.
The NEST is designed to connect activity back to the same underlying organization and contact whenever possible.
This keeps your order history, notes, payment activity, and relationship information together instead of scattering it across duplicate records.
### Think in layers
A useful way to think about the structure is:
**Organization → Branch → Contact**
Not every organization needs multiple branches, and not every contact needs to be tied to a specific branch.
Use only the level of detail that reflects the real relationship.
The goal is not to create complexity.
The goal is to make sure that when you look at a relationship later, you can tell **which company, which office, and which person** you actually worked with.