The shared schema

Most business software fragments your data: the CRM has its own idea of a contact, the ATS has its own idea of a candidate, and the document tool knows neither. Excellent avoids that with a single canonical entity layer that every app shares.

The canonical entities

At the foundation sit shared building blocks, including:

• Workspaces — the top-level container for an operation.
• People and organizations — the actors your business deals with.
• Notes, tags, and activities — the context and history attached to them.
• Custom fields — an escape hatch for data that doesn't fit the standard shape.

One person, everywhere

Because these entities are shared, a single person can be a CRM contact, a hiring candidate, and a meeting attendee at once — and it's the same record. Update it in one place and every app sees the change.

This is what makes an agent effective: it isn't reconciling three different databases, it's reasoning over one coherent picture of your operation.

Apps don't reinvent the wheel

Each app builds on the shared layer instead of duplicating it. In Hiring, candidates are people and resumes are attachments. In CRM, contacts are people. The apps add their own workflow on top — pipelines, scorecards, stages — but the underlying records are common property.

Next: see how the apps use this foundation.