Record visibility

By default, everyone in a workspace sees every contact, lead, deal and company in it. That is right for most teams and it is where every workspace starts. Record visibility is the setting that changes it when a team gets big enough that "everyone sees everything" stops being what people want.

There are exactly two settings, and an owner picks one for the whole workspace in Settings → Security.

The two settings

Everyone in the workspace (the default) is how the CRM has always behaved. Every member sees every record, whoever owns it.

Owners and their managers narrows it. A member sees:

• the records they own,
• the records owned by anyone reporting to them, however far down the chain,
• and every record with no owner at all.

Reporting lines come from the manager set on each user in Settings → Team. A manager sees their reports' books; their reports do not see each other's.

An owner always sees everything

Workspace owners are exempt. An owner who could not see the workspace could not administer it: they could not reassign a departing rep's accounts, could not audit anything, and could not answer a customer question about a record they are not on. So the setting narrows what members see, never what an owner sees.

Unowned records stay visible to everyone

A record with no owner is visible to every member, under both settings. This is deliberate and it matters more than it sounds: a brand-new inbound lead has no owner yet. If unowned meant invisible, that lead would be invisible to everybody until somebody who could not see it thought to claim it, and the workspace would quietly lose its inbound.

The practical consequence is that assignment is what makes a record private, not creation. Until somebody owns it, it is on the shared pile.

It governs reads, not writes

Record visibility decides what you can see. It does not add a second layer of permission over what you can change.

• A record you cannot see reads as not found, everywhere: the record page, search, exports, the public API, and the AI connector. It returns the same message a record from another workspace returns, so nothing is learned from the difference between "not yours" and "no such record".
• What you may create, edit or delete is decided by your role, exactly as before. Turning visibility on does not lock a member out of editing a record they can still see.

Where it applies

The same scope is enforced on every surface, not just the screens:

The connector is the one worth saying out loud. A setting that held on the web app but not in Claude would be a setting that does not exist, since a rep asking an assistant is the easiest way to read a record.

What it does not cover

Some things are shared on purpose and stay shared under both settings:

• The team inbox. Email is one queue for the whole team by design. A conversation nobody can pick up is a customer nobody answers.
• Contracts and support cases. A contract is a commitment the company is on the hook for, and a case has to be workable by whoever is on shift.
• Tasks, notes and the calendar. These hang off work being coordinated rather than off a book of accounts.

Turning it on

Only a workspace owner can change the setting, and nothing changes until one does. Switching to Owners and their managers takes effect immediately, on every surface at once. Switching back restores the workspace-wide view just as immediately: nothing is copied or moved, and no ownership is rewritten, so the change is entirely reversible.

Before you turn it on, it is worth checking two things: that your reporting lines in Settings → Team are the ones you actually want enforced, and that records you expect people to work are owned by the people you expect to work them.