A contact’s status tells you whether your association treats that person as active. You’ll see the status throughout the Console as a small colored badge. Changing a status and deleting a contact both start from the contact record, but they have very different results because deletion permanently removes the record.
When to Use Which
Change a contact’s status when someone is no longer active, has passed away, or is a duplicate you have not merged yet. The record and its history stay in place. Delete a contact only when you are sure the record should be gone for good, and nothing else in Rhythm needs to refer to it. Deletion cannot be undone, and there is no restore option in the product.
Tip
If a contact has many related records, such as memberships, registrations, or financial transactions, Rhythm will likely refuse the deletion. In that case, marking the contact inactive is usually more practical because you do not have to clean up every dependent record first. Use the same approach for an organization with dependent records: mark it inactive instead of trying to delete it.
Change a Contact's Status
Prerequisites
Permission to change a contact’s status.
- Open the contact’s record.
- Select Contact Options, then Change Status.
- Under Status:, choose Active, Deceased, Duplicate, or Inactive.
- If you chose Deceased, you can also set a Deceased Date:.
- The Notes/Comments: box contains the contact’s existing notes, so review the warning below before you edit it.
- Select Save Changes.
Result
A message confirms the status was updated, and the contact record reloads with the new status shown as a colored badge.
Warning
The Notes/Comments: box in this dialog is the contact’s general notes field, not a note about the status change. When you save, the text in the box replaces the contact’s existing notes. If you clear the box or leave it blank, the contact’s notes are erased. The same is true for the deceased date: if you save with that field blank, any previously saved deceased date is erased too.
A few other things are helpful to know about this dialog:
- You can change from any status to any other status. For example, you do not need to mark a contact inactive before you mark them deceased.
- If you change a deceased contact back to active, Rhythm does not clear the saved deceased date automatically. It stays on the record until someone removes it.
- Rhythm does not keep a status history on the contact record itself. To see a contact’s previous status, open Contact Options and review the contact’s system audit log. That log does not always include an earlier change to Inactive, so do not rely on it to always show who changed a status or when. Your account’s broader audit history covers the same ground.
- Every new contact starts as active by default. You do not choose a starting status when you create one.
- Rhythm never marks a contact inactive automatically because of elapsed time or inactivity. A console user has to change the status by hand.
- Rhythm generates each contact’s ID when the record is created. Changing an existing contact’s ID afterward is not recommended because audit logs keep referencing the old ID for past purchases and membership changes. An altered ID can also create conflicts for a future contact who would otherwise receive it.
- The four Contact Status values — Active, Deceased, Duplicate, and Inactive — are fixed and cannot be edited or extended in the Console or in setup. If you need to track something they do not cover, such as a date-dependent condition similar to Deceased, add a custom field to the contact form instead.
Delete a Contact
Prerequisites
Permission to delete contacts. Deletion is available to staff and service accounts only — Portal members cannot delete a contact record.
- Open the contact’s record.
- Select Contact Options, then Delete Contact.
- Confirm the deletion when prompted: "You are deleting the contact
<name>. This operation cannot be undone." Select Yes, delete it! to proceed.
Result
The contact is permanently removed, and you return to the CRM home page.
Warning
Deletion is permanent. You cannot restore a deleted contact from within the product. Only your account’s audit history keeps the contact’s last saved state.
If the Delete Is Refused
You cannot delete a contact while other Rhythm records still depend on it, such as memberships, event registrations, or financial transactions tied to that person. When those records exist, the delete fails with a generic error instead of showing a list of what is blocking it. If this happens and you do not want to find and remove every dependent record first, mark the contact Inactive instead of deleting it.
To find what is blocking the delete, check the relationships listed on the record. Memberships, organization relationships, group or event registrations, and connected external payment records are common culprits. Removing or disconnecting those items one by one is usually the fastest way to make the delete succeed. If the contact has many related records, or some that you cannot disconnect on your own, it is usually quicker to contact Support than to keep clearing items by hand. Some blocking records are not visible or easy to diagnose from the contact page at all. If you have removed everything you can find and the delete still fails, Support may need to investigate further, and the cause is not always the same from one Rhythm account to another.
If you are deleting a contact to satisfy a privacy request, a full deletion may not be possible when the record has to stay in place for referential integrity, such as when financial transactions still point to it. In that case, anonymizing the contact’s name and other personal fields while keeping the underlying record is the usual alternative to a hard delete. You can also mark the contact Inactive to block access to the record while a deletion or anonymization request is under review, without waiting for the full request to be resolved.
The Status Badge
Wherever a contact’s status appears, such as in search results, on the record page, and in other places, a non-active status shows as a colored badge. The badge helps you recognize that a record is not active without opening it.
Status does more than display a badge. An Active contact can sign in to the member portal and other sites, and appears in Console universal search. Setting a contact to Inactive removes both: an inactive contact is excluded from universal search and stops receiving future communications and system emails, including billing notices. Marking a contact inactive does not, by itself, remove them from membership-related contact lists. A membership has its own status, separate from the contact’s status, and you change each one independently. Changing a contact’s status to Inactive also does not reduce your overall contact count. Inactive contacts still count toward the total, and deleting the records, which is irreversible, is the only way to bring that count down.
Related Reading
If a contact is marked Duplicate because you found that it is the same person as another record, the next step is usually to merge the duplicate contacts instead of leaving two separate records indefinitely. What happens to a contact’s activities and relationships when it is deleted or merged is covered separately from this article.