This is a YouTube video titled "Should you use a Record or Field in SmartSuite?" containing a single-speaker explanation from August 7, 2023, about how to decide whether data should be treated as a record or a field in a CRM context, focusing on practical rules of thumb for data structuring.
How do I know if data should be a record or a field? I wanted to give you a quick rule of thumb. If you are stuck between record and a field, one of the easiest questions you can ask yourself is, does this piece of data, does it have an action that needs to be associated with it? Let's just say we have donations that we're tracking, but let's say we're trying to figure out how to do our donation CRM and we're stuck on this question of does my donor need to be task a record, a thing that I'm connecting together so I have two of these different records I can click between? Or should my donor just be a field? How do I know which one I need to have a donor as a connection or a donor as a field? This is the rule of thumb. Do I need to do an action based on this information? If so, you've narrowed it down to two options, checklist, field, or record. If the answer is no, it's a field. But once you've answered that, ask yourself if you need to have all of the features that records have. Those kinds of requirements will help you decide between a checklist and a record.
