One organization.
Every relationship.

Start with the organization

An organization is the business or entity your team works with. It gives you a shared place for its identity and the context that belongs to the organization, including its addresses and connections to people.

Think of the organization as the answer to “who is this?” Its profiles answer a different question: “how do we work with them?” Keeping those ideas separate lets a relationship evolve without starting over with another copy of the same company.

Add the relationship with a profile

Valira includes Customer, Supplier, and Competitor profiles. Each represents a different way an organization can relate to your business:

• Customer: an organization that buys from you.
• Supplier: an organization you source products or services from.
• Competitor: an organization you compete with for business.

These relationships do not have to be mutually exclusive. The same organization can be both a customer and a supplier. Its shared identity stays together, while each profile holds the context relevant to that relationship.

Create an organization and its profiles

Use this sequence when setting up your organization records. Available profiles and fields depend on your workspace configuration and access.

1. Check for an existing organization. Search for the company first, including common name variations. If it is already there, work with that record.
2. Create the organization if it is new. Enter its name and the shared company details available in your workspace. Use a consistent naming convention so teammates can find it later.
3. Add the relevant profile. Associate a Customer, Supplier, Competitor, or additional profile configured for your business with that organization to reflect the relationship you need to manage.
4. Complete the relationship details. Fill in the fields offered by the profile. Keep shared company information with the organization and relationship-specific information with its profile.
5. Save and review. Confirm that the profile belongs to the intended organization. Add other applicable profiles to that same organization as your relationship expands.

The goal is one recognizable organization with the profiles your team actually uses. You do not need a profile for every possible relationship on day one.

See it in a real-world example

Imagine you sell installation services to Northstar Supply. Northstar also sells you components for other jobs. This is an illustrative example of one company playing two roles.

With separate customer and supplier lists, a team may create “Northstar Supply” twice. When its company information changes, someone has to find and update both copies. Differences in spelling or contact information can make those copies harder to connect.

With a shared organization model, Northstar has one organization record and both a Customer profile and a Supplier profile. Your team can recognize the same company in both relationships without treating the relationships as identical.

Add profiles for the way you work

Your relationships do not have to stop at Customer, Supplier, and Competitor. You can add additional profiles to reflect the roles that matter to your business, while keeping each organization’s identity in one place.

Consider a design-build contractor with an in-house engineering department. The contractor buys products from you for a job it is delivering, so it has a Customer profile. Its engineers also design the system those products will become part of. That engineering influence is another relationship worth understanding.

To track that role, you might create an additional profile called Engineers and add it to the same organization. The Customer profile represents the purchasing relationship; the Engineers profile represents its role in system design and product selection. Both describe the same contractor.

When deciding what to capture for an Engineers profile, start with the questions your team needs to answer. For example, you might want to record engineering disciplines, systems the team designs, or product preferences. These are examples of information to consider when configuring the profile, rather than a prescribed set of fields.

The organization profile identifies the company’s engineering role. The individual engineers are people connected to that organization. Details of who influenced a particular job or specification still need to be recorded against the relevant work; adding an Engineers profile alone does not measure influence.

This distinction helps your team look beyond who placed the order to who helped shape the design. If you kept engineers in a separate company table, you could end up with another copy of the contractor to maintain and reconcile. An additional profile extends the organization you already know.

Why use a shared organization record?

Separate tables for customers, suppliers, and competitors can feel straightforward at first. The difficulty comes when each table repeats the full company identity. A shared organization record reduces that repetition while leaving room for different profile details.

For your team, this can mean less duplicate entry, fewer conflicting company details, and a clearer picture of who you work with. For reporting and integrations, a common organization reference reduces the need to reconcile different versions of the same entity.

This is about avoiding duplicate identities, not forcing every field into one giant table. Separate profile tables can still be useful when they link back to the same organization. A shared record also does not replace access controls or automatically clean up existing duplicates.

Keep the model useful as you grow

Agree on organization names, search before adding records, and add profiles when a relationship requires them. Keep separate legal entities distinct even when they share a brand, and review duplicates before bringing older customer and supplier lists into the system.

Organizations give your team a consistent identity to work from. Profiles let that identity support the different relationships your business needs today—and the ones that develop next.