Learn about the folk data model, to understand how you can best manage & leverage your data in your workspace.
folk's data model has four core concepts: records, fields, groups, and views. Once you're familiar with these and how they fit together, the rest of folk will feel intuitive.
In your folk workspace, in order to be able to work on your records (people, companies and potentially deals/custom objects), you need to add these records to groups. Default records can be either people or companies. These records are available throughout your workspace.
Groups are categories to organize different type of records to leverage them in different workflows (e.g., "Leads", "Clients").
From each group, you're able to:
Share the group with selected members
Create as many custom fields you want
Create table and pipeline views
Track relationships with records in this group with notes, reminders
Launch email campaigns to selected records of this group
People & companies
A record is a person or a company you want to track in Folk. It's the equivalent of a row in a spreadsheet.
Every record lives in your workspace and can be referenced from anywhere. A record can be a person (e.g., Jane Doe, Head of Sales at Acme) or a company (e.g., Acme Inc.).
Each record has a set of native fields that come built-in:
People: First name, Last name, Companies, Job Title, Description, Birthday, Gender, URLs, Emails, Phone numbers, Addresses.
Companies: Name, Email, Phone numbers, Addresses, URLs, Description.
Native fields are shared across your entire workspace. If you update Jane's job title in one place, it updates everywhere.
Records also carry interactions, notes, and reminders — all of which are shared across the workspace, not scoped to a single group.
Fields
A field describes what kind of information a record holds. Fields are the equivalent of column titles in a spreadsheet.
folk has three types of fields:
Native fields — the built-in fields above (name, email, etc.). Shared across the workspace.
Smart fields — automatically computed by Folk based on your data. Examples: My last interaction, Strongest connection, Team last interaction. Shared across the workspace.
Custom fields — fields you define yourself (text, number, select, multi-select, magic fields). Custom fields belong to a single group and are not shared with other groups.
The split matters: native and smart fields describe the record (and travel with them everywhere), while custom fields describe the record's role in a specific workflow (and stay scoped to that workflow), for example "Status" in the "Sales" group.
Groups
A group is a customizable database for a specific workflow — for example, Leads, Investors, Clients, Candidates. It's the equivalent of a tab in a spreadsheet, with its own columns (custom fields), its own filters, and its own collaborators.
In each group you can:
Add records (people, companies, or both).
Create custom fields specific to that workflow.
Build table and pipeline views.
Send email campaigns to selected records.
Share access with selected workspace members.
Each group starts with two default views — All people and All companies — and the native and smart fields described above.
Good to know:
There's no limit to how many records a group can contain, or how many groups a record can belong to.
Deleting a group does not delete the records inside it. It does delete the group's custom fields, custom-field values, notes-on-group, reminders, and campaign history.
Views
A view is a saved way of looking at the records inside a group. It's the equivalent of a saved filter, sort, and column arrangement in a spreadsheet.
In every view you can:
Choose to show people, companies, or deals.
Pick a layout: table or pipeline (kanban).
Apply filters and sorting.
Reorder, hide, or display the fields you want.
Views are scoped to the group they live in. You can have as many views as you need within a single group.
Good to know: Editing a record's data inside a view edits the record itself — the change is visible in every view of that group, and in every group that record belongs to (for native and smart fields). Removing a record from a view removes them from the entire group.
💬 Do you have any questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you! You can find the folk team via:
Live chat from your account (the ? button in the bottom right-hand corner)
Or send us an email