Tags: One Taxonomy Across Companies, Contacts, Documents

The universal tag system gives companies, contacts, and documents one shared catalog. A “GDPR” tag has one definition, one color, and one scope model, whether it appears on a company, a contact, or a document. /settings/tags is the catalog manager.

The catalog

Each tag has a name, a color (chosen from a fixed palette of 16), and an entity-scope set (any combination of companies, contacts, documents). A tag can be company-only ("Strategic Partner"), document-only ("Master Service Agreement"), or universal ("GDPR-relevant"). The scope determines where the tag appears in the entity-detail tag-pickers.

Renaming and merging

Renaming a tag updates everywhere it’s applied — no orphans, no fragments. Merging two tags (you accidentally created "GDPR-relevant" and "GDPR Relevant" with different capitalization) consolidates them into one row, with all entities now pointing at the merged row. The merge is audit-logged.

Bulk apply

From a list view (companies, contacts, documents), select multiple rows and apply a tag. The tag-picker only shows tags scoped to that entity type. Useful for the "tag every company involved in the 2024 Q4 audit" kind of operation.

Color discipline

The palette of 16 is intentionally limited. Free-form color choice produces inconsistent UIs over time (some tags red, some pink, some salmon, all meaning roughly "urgent"). The fixed palette keeps the UI scannable: green-ish tags in one cluster, red-ish tags in another, the user’s eye learns the patterns without re-training every quarter.

Other taxonomy pages

Tags aren’t the only taxonomy. /settings/industries (company industries), /settings/contact-roles (contact roles within companies), /settings/services (service offerings), /settings/core/categories (device categories) are the other catalogs. Each uses the same edit-rename-merge pattern, scoped to its specific domain.