What is Insightly CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Insightly holds current and prospective customer data in one place: a contact’s details, who they work for, what you owe them, and what has happened so far.
On this page:
- What you can do with it
- Objects, records, and fields
- The standard objects
- Navigating
- Viewing a record
- Searching
What you can do with it
- Contact management. Linking shows the relationship between contacts and other records, such as where someone works or what projects are outstanding for them.
- Sales management. Customizable pipelines, kanban views, and workflow automation track each stage of a deal.
- Project management. Milestones, pipelines, and kanban views cover pre-sales and post-sales work, with deadlines and progress.
- Task management. Reminders, to-do lists, and call logs, with activity sets generating tasks automatically.
- Reporting and dashboards. Visual insight into the business and the metrics behind it.
Insightly CRM Home Dashboard Overview
Objects, records, and fields
The three terms underpin everything else.
Objects are the types of record you can create. They are the items in the left navigation bar. Insightly ships with several standard objects and you can build custom ones.
Records live inside objects and hold fields. An organization record might be the local animal shelter, tracking who runs it, how to contact them, and what discount they get. Records link to other records.
Fields are the information inside a record: names, dates, phone numbers, anything you need to track. Standard fields come with the product, and custom fields cover what is specific to your work.
The three nest. Click the contacts object and you get a list of contact records; click one of those and you get the fields holding that person’s information. How an object is configured determines how its records behave, so a company selling roller skates could add a shoe-size dropdown to the opportunity object and have every salesperson pick from it.
Contacts Object in Insightly CRM Navigation
The standard objects
| Object | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Contacts | People directly associated with your business: colleagues, customers, people you provide services to. |
| Leads | Potential clients at the start of the sales process, not yet in the pipeline. Converted to contacts when they reach a sales opportunity. |
| Organizations | Companies you do business with. Linked contacts appear in the Related tab. |
| Opportunities | The sales process: value, why the customer is interested, and timeline. Pipelines track the stages. Converts to a project once won. |
| Projects | The work after a closed sale, plus in-house processes and goals. Usually managed with pipelines, or with milestones instead. |
| Tasks | The individual assignments making up sales, project, or day-to-day work. Linked tasks appear in the record’s Activity tab. Tasks can also stand alone. |
| Events | Important dates, connectable to the Insightly calendar and linked to records. Appear in the Activity tab. |
| Emails | Saved copies of incoming and outgoing mail. Insightly can import and link them automatically. Appear in the Activity tab. |
| Notes | Messages added to a record, for details worth keeping. Appear in the Related tab. |
Viewing a Lead Record in Insightly CRM
Navigating
Logging in lands you on the Command Center, which pulls tasks, opportunities, leads, and emails into one view.
The Insights dropdown holds Dashboards, which display your data as cards of graphs and charts, and Recent Activity, a timeline of recent changes filterable by activity type and user.
The navigation bar down the left reaches records, reports, dashboards, and the home screen.
Insightly CRM Left Navigation Menu
The header bar across the top carries:
- Collapsible menu. The arrow shows and hides the object names in the navigation bar.
- Search bar, top center. Covered below.
- Plus icon, upper right. Adds new records.
- Square icon, upper right. Custom apps you have access to.
- Bell icon, upper right. Notifications for records you follow, plus the controls for which records you follow and your notification settings.
- Profile menu, upper right corner.
Insightly CRM Top Navigation Bar
The profile menu holds Help, Phone Support, Keyboard Shortcuts, User Settings for your own preferences such as time zone and calendar, System Settings and Billing and Account for administrators only, and Log Out.
Insightly CRM User Menu Options
Viewing a record
- Click the object in the navigation menu.
- Click the record name.
A panel opens with the record’s information. Clicking the record’s icon opens the full view instead of the blade view.
The Actions menu in the upper right of a record edits, merges, clones, or deletes it, with options varying by object.
Page Layouts reorder or hide fields on a record. Administrators create them per object and can assign different layouts to different profiles.
Searching
The global search bar sits top center. Clicking into it shows the last ten records you viewed. Typing lists matching records by relevance, and pressing Enter or clicking a “Search [term] in ...” link opens a fuller results page.
The All dropdown to the left of the search bar filters to one object, including as you type. Every searchable object is listed there except dashboards and reports.
ℹ️ A newly added record can take a few minutes to appear in search results.
How matching works
An exact match on a contact name ranks above a match inside notes or comments.
Searching contacts or leads displays the email address in parentheses after the name, as Name (Email), or just the name where there is no address. Searching contacts or opportunities also shows the linked Primary Organization underneath, so you can confirm you have the right record before selecting it.
Quotes force an exact match. Typing Cabral finds Cabrallo and Cabraló as well; typing “Cabral” returns only exact matches.
⚠️ Accents are not interchangeable. Insightly will not match unaccented characters to accented ones, so “Pete Alvares” will not find “Pete Álvares”.
Emails, URLs, and numbers
Entering a complete email address or URL prioritizes the Email Address and URL fields. Partial email addresses work; web addresses need the full URL.
A string of digits with no dashes, hyphens, or parentheses matches phone numbers and other number strings whatever format they are stored in.
⚠️ Number matches have to be complete. Partial number strings will not match.
Tags and field values
A record carrying a single tag can be found by searching that tag alone. A field holding a specific value can be found by searching that value.