Overview
Slate's data model is built around a hierarchy designed to support any workflow. The following sections describe how the pieces fit together.
Organizations & Companies
An organization is the top level container, typically your business. Under it, you create companies, each acting as an independent workspace with its own pipelines, team members, contacts, and settings.
Most teams use a single company. Multiple companies are useful for separate departments, clients, or brands.
Pipelines
A pipeline represents a workflow, the journey something takes from start to finish. Examples:
| Sales | Deal Pipeline with stages like Lead, Qualified, Proposal, Negotiation, and Closed |
| Support | Ticket Pipeline with stages like New, In Progress, Waiting, and Resolved |
| Hiring | Recruitment pipeline with stages like Applied, Phone Screen, Interview, Offer, and Hired |
| Projects | Task Board with stages like Backlog, In Progress, Review, and Done |
Each pipeline has its own blueprint, the set of custom fields that define what data you track. Blueprints are versioned, so changes to your fields do not affect existing items. Pipeline templates are available for common workflows across various industries.
Stages
Stages are the columns on your Kanban board. Items move through stages as they progress. You can configure:
| Order | Set using sort order to control column position |
| Permissions | Restrict who can view or edit items in a stage |
| Fields | Each stage can show different fields |
Statuses
Statuses are optional substeps within stages that help track item progress. For example, an item in a "Proposal" stage might move through statuses like Draft, Sent, and Reviewed to indicate where it stands within that stage.
Reporting designations
For reporting purposes, you can mark specific stages or statuses as Won or Lost. This powers win/loss rates and revenue metrics across your pipeline reports.
Items
Items are the individual records in your pipeline, whether that is a deal, a ticket, a candidate, or a task. Each item has:
- Short ID, an automatically generated identifier that is automatically assigned
- Custom fields defined by your pipeline blueprint
- Stage and status
- Assignees, the team members responsible
- Activity log for notes, calls, and emails
- Score, an optional lead score when scoring is enabled
- Proposals, invoices, and tasks linked to it
Items can be deleted and restored, and moved between stages using drag-and-drop on the Kanban board.
Searching items
The dashboard search bar filters items client-side by name, contact name, email, phone, and short ID. For deeper search across all pipelines, press Cmd+P (or Ctrl+P) to open the command palette. Type to search items in the database by name, contact details, or short ID. Select a result to open its detail view. The command palette also provides quick navigation to any page.
Fields
Fields are organized into categories, each with its own set of types and display variants:
| Input | Text, email, URL, phone, currency, number, file upload, textarea, and more |
| Radio | Single select with buttons, cards, tabs, scale, dropdown, and more |
| Select | Dropdown, tags, listbox, large cards, tabs, and more |
| Checkbox | Multi-select with buttons, cards, list, tabs, and more |
| Date & Time | Date, time, date and time, date range, natural language date, and more |
Each pipeline also has optional built in fields for email and phone that you can enable per pipeline.
Fields support validation rules, conditional visibility, currency formatting, and card indicator colors.
Roles and Permissions
Access in Slate is controlled at two levels.
User roles
Each user has a company wide role:
| Owner | The company creator. Can manage all company settings, delete the company, and remove members. Always has full access to all pipelines and stages |
| Admin | A promoted member. Can create and update items, pipelines, stages, and teams, and add members |
| Member | The default role. Can view items, contacts, and tasks within the pipelines and stages they have been granted access to |
Teams
Users can be organized into teams (e.g., "Sales", "Support"). Each team member has a role within the team:
| Manager | Can manage the team and its members |
| Member | Standard team member |
Pipeline and stage permissions
For more granular control, you can assign permissions to teams or individual users at the pipeline or stage level:
| Read | View items in the pipeline or stage |
| Write | Create and edit items |
| Manage | Full control, including managing assignees and tasks within the pipeline or stage |
Owners always have full access to all pipelines and stages. See Teams & Permissions for details.