Meetings & Calls

A meeting or call is stored as an Event record (crm_event) — one row per interaction that takes a slot on somebody's calendar, whether it already happened (a call you just logged) or is booked for next Tuesday.

Events are the queryable answer to "what happened with this customer, and when?". They are deliberately not the same thing as a task:

An email is a third shape: it is not a calendar slot, so Send Email writes no event (see Email & Calendar) — but it does refresh the customer's contact recency, just like a held meeting.

The three buttons

Every lead, contact, account, opportunity and case carries the same three actions:

You will find them in the record header, in the ⋮ menu of a list-view row, and on related lists. (On a case, the record header carries Log a Call alongside Escalate and Close; the other two are still registered on cases and reachable from the list-view row menu.)

What each form asks for

Both Log a Call and Log a Meeting ask for:

• Subject (required)
• Duration (minutes) — optional on all three actions
• Contact Attendees — pick any number of contacts
• Internal Attendees — pick any number of colleagues
• Notes — what was discussed

Schedule a Meeting adds Start Date (UTC), Start Time (UTC) and Location, and renames the notes box to Agenda.

⚠️ The start date and time of a scheduled meeting are read as UTC, which is why both field labels say so. Convert before you type: a 15:00 meeting in UTC+8 is entered as 07:00. Everything HotCRM stores is a UTC instant; the picker simply does not know your timezone yet.

What one click produces

Logging a call on an opportunity writes three things, not one:

1. The event — subject, type, status, start time, duration, location, notes, owned by you, and linked back to the record you fired the action from.
2. The attendees — one row per person (see below). You are added as the organizer, with your response already set to Accepted; a contact or lead you fired the action from is added as an attendee too.
3. A timeline entry — the record's activity timeline gains an entry that points at the event, so the drill-through from the timeline opens the real record rather than a summary string.

On a case, the first held call or meeting also stamps the case's First Response Date — the moment the customer first heard back. A meeting merely booked does not count as a response, and neither does a status change.

Planned vs Held — the distinction that keeps reports honest

Every event carries a status:

Only a Held event refreshes the customer's contact clock. A meeting booked for next quarter is not an interaction that happened, and letting a booking reset the clock is exactly how an "at risk" report learns to lie about a customer nobody has spoken to.

So there is one habit worth building:

After the meeting, open the event and set Status → Held.

The clock moves on the transition into Held — once, not on every later save. Cancelled and No Show meetings keep their row (the attempt is evidence) but their duration is zeroed, so "customer minutes this week" stays truthful.

What refreshes "last activity"

Two fields carry customer recency, and reports such as the quiet-account tiles on the Sales Activity dashboard are built on them:

• Account → Last Activity Date
• Contact / Lead → Last Contacted Date

Exactly these actions refresh them:

The account stamp walks up the chain. A rep logs a call on the opportunity, the contact or the case — almost never on the account row itself — so the event follows the link up to the account behind it and stamps that. Without the walk-up, a busy customer looks silent for an entire sales cycle.

Two things this table does not include, on purpose:

• A Planned event, and an event that was already Held before you saved it again.
• A meeting linked to nothing. The event warns you when no related record is set, and an interaction attached to no customer cannot refresh any customer's clock.

Admins should also know that changing an account's owner or type stamps its Last Activity Date as a side effect of the edit. It is not an interaction; if you are auditing silence, read the events, not just the date.

Attendees are records, not a text box

Everyone in the room is a real row (crm_event_attendee) hanging off the meeting — which is what makes "which contacts declined twice this quarter?" and "what has this rep actually attended?" answerable at all.

Each attendee row holds:

A row must fill exactly the party its Attendee Type names, and nothing else: a Contact row needs a contact, an External row needs a name in External Attendee. An attendee pointing at nobody is rejected, and so is one whose type disagrees with the column that is filled — a row cannot claim to be a contact while naming an outside guest.

Deleting people and meetings

• Delete a person (contact, lead or colleague) → their attendee rows go with them, and the meeting itself survives with its subject, times and outcome notes intact. This is what keeps a person deletable: before it worked this way, anyone who had ever attended a meeting could not be erased at all.
• Delete a meeting that still has attendees → refused, naming the attendee rows that hold it. Remove the attendee rows first, then the meeting deletes. A meeting's attendee list is part of the meeting's historical record, so it is never silently discarded.

What the system fills in for you

• Duration ↔ end time. Give a start and an end, and the duration is measured from them (even if you typed a different number — a stored duration that disagrees with its own timestamps is what turns a report into nonsense). Give a start and a duration, and the end time is calculated, which is what puts a logged call on the calendar.
• All-day events keep no minute count, so "all day" stays distinguishable from "we forgot to fill it in".
• Cancelled / No Show → duration zeroed.
• End before start is rejected outright.
• No related record raises a warning — link the meeting to the deal or the case, or it will be invisible where it matters.

Where to find events

Activity › Events is the one sidebar entry, and every way of reading those rows is a tab across the top of the page it opens:

My Work › My Calendar is the one shortcut kept in the sidebar: it lands on that same page with the My Calendar tab already selected, because your own week is the view you open most.

The six event types — Meeting (default), Call, Demo, Webinar, Onsite Visit, Other — colour the calendar and drive the activity-mix reporting on the Sales Activity dashboard.

There is no "past events" filter on a date, and that is deliberate: status is authored and does not decay, whereas a date-based flag is stale the moment the clock passes it.

Who sees what

• Events are private: a rep sees their own, a sales manager sees the whole team's, an admin sees everything. Service agents can log and read their own events on cases.
• Attendee rows behave differently today. Access to them is meant to derive from the meeting, but on the current platform the derivation does not narrow by ownership, so any user whose profile grants read on Event Attendees can read attendee rows for meetings they cannot open. Keep that in mind before granting the object to a wider audience; the narrowing is a platform fix in flight, not an app setting.

How the AI assistant helps

Because a meeting is now an ordinary record, the assistant's Live Data skill reads it like any other object — "how many meetings did we hold with Acme last quarter?", "which of my accounts have had no interaction in 60 days?" — against the live schema, so a field you add today is usable in the same conversation. No skill writes events; the three buttons above are the writers.

Tips for reps

• ✅ Log the call from the opportunity or the case, not from the account — the link is what surfaces it on that record, and the account clock is stamped for you anyway.
• ✅ Go back and flip the meeting to Held. A calendar full of Planned meetings tells your manager nothing and moves no customer's clock.
• ✅ Put the real attendees in. "Who at the customer has never joined a call?" is only answerable if you did.
• ✅ Use Outcome Notes on the event for what was agreed — the notes box on the log form records what was discussed; the outcome is what the next person needs.

Tips for admins

• ✅ Coach on Held, not on volume: the quiet-account tiles are only as honest as the status field.
• ✅ Watch No Show — a rising no-show rate on one account is a churn signal well before the renewal.
• ✅ Events are a private object. If a manager reports an empty calendar, check their permission set's record scope before suspecting the data.
• ✅ Remember the UTC start-time entry when writing internal how-tos for teams outside UTC.