How to group records

Prolibu offers four ways to bring contacts together, and they differ on two questions: who decides who goes in, and when that gets decided.

Mechanism	Who decides who goes in	When it’s decided
Contact lists	You, contact by contact	Once; it stays fixed until you change it
Groups	You, in the record’s Group field	Once; can be applied in bulk
Tags	You, marking each record	Once; can be applied in bulk
Saved filters	A condition you write	Every time you open it

What sets filters apart

The first three save records. The fourth saves a question.

A list with fifteen contacts will still hold those fifteen tomorrow, however the business moves. A saved filter along the lines of stage = Customer returns whatever meets that condition at the moment you open it: if twenty contacts sit in that stage today and twenty-five do tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll see twenty-five without touching a thing.

That gives you the practical rule: if the group is defined by a criterion Prolibu can evaluate on its own, save a filter. If it’s defined by your own judgment — the clients you personally handle, the picks for a one-off campaign — use a list, a group, or a tag.

Choosing between list, group, and tag

All three are manual, but they aren’t used the same way:

• Tags — several per contact, visible on the record and in the table. They classify across the board: VIP, Overdue, Trade show 2026. It’s the quickest option when you’re marking many records, since they’re applied from Edit selected.
• Group — a single value per contact, meant for splitting up the book of business. It can also be assigned in bulk.
• Contact lists — a module of their own, with a name, a description, and owners. They pay off when the group itself is the unit of work and you want to see it as a separate entity, not as a mark inside each record.

The cost of lists is filling them. There’s no shortcut from the Contacts table: either you pick them one at a time inside the list, or you prepare an import file with a comma-separated contacts column. See Add or remove contacts from a list.

Sharpening a filter’s criterion

When a filter is the right route, the Filters panel takes simple and advanced conditions, combines them with AND or OR, and saves them under a name. It’s explained in Determine filter criteria and in Creating and managing saved views.