The activity timeline shows the activities recorded for one contact or organization, with the newest items first. On the Activities tab of a contact or organization record, you’ll see phone calls, meetings, site visits, and any other activity types your account tracks. Administrators can also add the timeline directly to a custom record page.
What Shows Up, and in What Order
Timeline entries are grouped by month. The newest month appears at the top, and the newest entry appears first within each month. Each entry shows an icon for the activity type, such as “Phone Call” or “Site Visit,” the date and time it happened, a short description, and an expandable note when someone added more detail.
A contact’s timeline can include two kinds of entries:
- Activities staff recorded by hand. Anyone who can open the record can view these entries. Adding, editing, and deleting activities each require separate permissions, described below.
- Email-marketing activity from a connected integration. If your account is connected to an email-marketing tool such as Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign, opens and clicks for that contact appear on the same timeline as staff-recorded activities. You cannot edit or delete these entries from the timeline because they come from the integration.
An organization’s timeline shows only the activities staff recorded for that organization. Email-marketing activity belongs to the contact, so it never appears on an organization’s timeline, even for that organization’s contacts.
The Activities tab shows activity records that staff, or a connected integration, explicitly added. It also includes the email-marketing events described above. It is not a complete audit trail of every action taken on the contact or organization elsewhere in your account.
Reading an Entry
Each entry shows:
- an icon for its activity type;
- the date and time, such as “Tuesday, March 3 at 2:15 PM”;
- one line describing what happened;
- an expandable note, if someone wrote a longer description.
Above the entries, you can use the search box, activity-type filter, and date-range control to narrow a long history. These controls only change what you see on the screen; they do not change the stored activity records.
Who Can Change What
You do not need special permission to view the timeline. If you can open the contact or organization record, you can see its activity history, including entries recorded before you had access. Adding, editing, and deleting an activity each require their own permission. If you can view a record but cannot add, edit, or delete activities on it, you still see the full timeline, but you do not see the controls for changing it.
Placing the Timeline on a Custom Record Page
By default, the timeline appears on the Activities tab of a contact or organization record. If your account uses custom 360 screens, an administrator can also place the activity timeline directly on a custom-designed contact or organization page instead of using the standard tab. This is the only activity or relationship element available as a 360 screen building block; relationships themselves are not available this way.
What This Means Day to Day
When you need to understand what has happened with a person or organization, start with the timeline. It shows whether they have been contacted recently, what was discussed, and, for contacts, whether an email campaign reached them. On a contact record, it is the one place where staff-recorded history and email-marketing activity appear together. Adding your own entry, and choosing which activity type to use, are covered separately.