Understanding objects
Objects are the tables your workspace is built from — the standard objects, plus custom objects for the things only your business tracks.
An object is a table: one kind of thing, with its own columns, holding one row per thing. In a spreadsheet you would make it a tab — Contacts, Companies, Bookings. In Winston each of those tabs is an object, and every record in your workspace belongs to exactly one of them.
The standard objects
Winston ships with a set of standard objects that cover what most front offices track. You can add attributes to them, but you never have to build them:
| Object | What each record stores |
|---|---|
| People | One human — a guest, lead, or contact. Name, email, phone, and the full timeline of every conversation with them across every inbox. |
| Companies | One organization — a corporate client, an agency, a supplier. Linked to the people who work there, so a company record shows everyone you talk to and everything discussed. |
| Events | One event — a wedding, a conference, a private dinner. Date, venue details, the people and company behind it, and where it stands from inquiry to confirmed. Comes with the restaurant & events venue template. |
| Deals | One thing you are trying to win — an inquiry, a contract, a renewal — moving through stages from first contact to closed. |
Standard objects are connected to each other out of the box: a person points at their company, an event points at both. Open any record and the related records are one click away — no VLOOKUP holding the tabs together.
Custom objects
When your business tracks something the standard objects do not cover — properties, boats, memberships, projects — you can create a custom object for it. The test for whether something deserves its own object is the same test as whether it deserves its own spreadsheet tab:
- It has its own columns. A property has an address and a capacity; a person does not.
- It has its own lifecycle. It moves through states — listed, booked, under maintenance — independently of any one person.
- Other records need to point at it. If several people, deals, or bookings all relate to the same thing, that thing wants to be an object, not a text field.
A custom object behaves exactly like a standard one: it gets its own attributes, its own records, and its own lists, and it can be related to any other object. If you are unsure whether to create one, define your data model walks through the decision with a real example.
For a video walkthrough, see Standard objects in Winston Academy.