As your customer and business network grows, simply storing contact information isn’t always enough. Understanding how contacts are connected—whether through reporting structures, departments, or referral relationships—helps your team navigate information more efficiently and maintain better records.

Horilla CRM makes this easy with the Parent Contact feature, which allows you to create parent-child relationships between contacts. Instead of managing these connections manually or relying on external organizational charts, you can build and view contact hierarchies directly within the CRM.

Whether you’re tracking managers and team members, department heads and employees, regional representatives, or other organizational relationships, contact hierarchies provide a clear view of how people are connected. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create, manage, and visualize contact hierarchies in Horilla CRM.

What Is a Contact Hierarchy?

A contact hierarchy is a way of organizing related contacts by creating parent-child relationships using the Parent Contact field. Instead of viewing contacts as separate records, you can link them together to represent real-world organizational or reporting structures.

Each contact can have:

  • One parent contact, representing the contact they report to or are associated with.
  • Multiple child contacts, representing contacts that report to or belong under that parent.

This flexible structure can be used to model managers and employees, department heads and team members, regional contacts, referral relationships, or any other hierarchical connection. By organizing contacts this way, your team can quickly understand how people are related, navigate between connected records, and maintain a well-structured contact database directly within the Contacts module.

Step 1: Assign a Parent Contact

The easiest way to create a hierarchy is by assigning a parent to an existing contact.

Open the Contact

Go to the contact that should become a child contact and click Edit.

Choose the Parent Contact

Find the Parent Contact field and select the appropriate contact from the searchable dropdown list.

After selecting the parent, click Save.

The relationship is created immediately, and both contact records reflect the update.

Step 2: Add a Child Contact from the Parent Record

You can also build the hierarchy from the parent contact instead of editing each child individually.

  1. Open the parent contact’s detail page.
  2. Go to the Child Contacts tab.
  3. Click Add.
  1. Search for and select the contact you want to add.
  2. Click Save.

The selected contact is added to the parent’s child contact list, where you can view details such as the contact’s title, first name, last name, and email address.

Step 3: View the Complete Hierarchy

To see the full relationship structure, open the Child Contacts tab and click View Hierarchy.

A hierarchy window opens, displaying the complete contact tree from the highest-level parent down to every child contact.

You can:

  • Expand or collapse each branch.
  • View every level of the hierarchy.
  • Easily identify the currently selected contact.

This makes it simple to understand reporting relationships without navigating between multiple records.

Step 4: Remove Relationships

As your organization changes, you can easily update the hierarchy.

Remove a Relationship

From the parent’s Child Contacts tab, click the Delete icon beside the child contact and confirm the action.

Benefits of Contact Hierarchies

Using contact hierarchies provides several advantages:

  • Keep reporting relationships organized in one place.
  • Support multiple hierarchy levels without restrictions.
  • Prevent invalid structures with built-in validation.
  • View the complete hierarchy through an interactive tree.
  • Update relationships quickly as teams or organizations change.

Managing relationships between contacts becomes much easier when they’re organized in a clear hierarchy. With Horilla CRM’s Parent Contact feature, you can build structured contact relationships, quickly identify reporting lines, and keep your contact data organized as your business grows.

Whether you’re managing corporate teams, branch offices, or referral networks, contact hierarchies provide a simple way to understand how contacts are connected. Since Horilla CRM prevents invalid relationships and allows you to update or reorganize the hierarchy at any time, you can confidently maintain an accurate and well-structured contact database.

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