What happens when I delete a contact, a lead or a colleague?

Nothing you delete in the CRM is destroyed. A delete archives the record: it leaves the lists you work from and stays in the database, with the date it was archived and who archived it. The archive is a place to put things, not a stage on the way to deletion — there is no timer and nothing is waiting to erase it.

What archives

• A contact. It leaves Contacts and keeps everything on it: its follow-ups, comments, activity, files, tagged properties, phone numbers, addresses, messages and conversations, and the leads and calendar entries that outlive it.
• The contact you do not keep in a merge. Everything attached to it moves to the survivor and the record itself is archived, naming the contact its history went to.
• A lead. It leaves the board and the lists, and keeps its timeline, comments, files and follow-ups. It also stops being nagged about and stops counting against whoever it was assigned to, which an archive that only hid it would not.
• A property, and a unit you manage for an owner. Both have had their own archive for longer than the rest.
• A deal, with the commission each party has a claim on.
• A colleague's seat. Their access ends the moment it is archived, the seat you pay for is freed, and the record that they held it — and at what grade — is kept, so "who handled this lead" is still answerable after they leave.

Getting one back

Contacts, properties, deals and managed units each have their archive on the screen: an Archived tab or Show archived finds the record, and Unarchive or Restore puts it back where it was. A restored record comes back whole rather than as a copy.

Leads and seats are archived in the same way, but the CRM has no archived view for either of them yet, so there is no button for you to press. The record is in the database and support can bring it back — ask them rather than re-entering the lead, because re-entering it would lose the timeline that was kept.

Putting a colleague back is the ordinary Add a seat: an agent who once held a seat is reinstated rather than given a second one, and the audit log records the reinstatement and the office they were in before.

What a delete does not do

It does not relax who may press it. Deleting still takes a manager with the right to delete, and removing a seat still takes an admin, because the permission belongs to the outcome the agent intends rather than to how it is implemented. The account's audit log records the action as an update naming the archive, not as a deletion — a permanent history claiming a record was destroyed when it is one flag away from being back on screen would be worse than no history.

Removing a seat also changes nothing about your bill on its own. Only the account owner changes how many seats the office pays for, on Plan and billing.

What is still removed outright

This is the part worth reading before you rely on the rest. The records below are deleted rather than archived today, so treat a delete on one of them as final:

• A document you delete from the vault. Archiving a document is a separate action and is the one to use; a signed document cannot be deleted by anybody.
• A lease.
• A follow-up, and a follow-up sequence.
• A milestone on a deal.
• A calendar entry.
• A WhatsApp message template.
• A connection to an outside service, and the webhooks and API keys on the open API.
• The rows behind a client portal share — a shortlist, a seller listing or a feedback note.

None of those is a person, a property or a colleague, which is where this work drew its line. They are named here rather than left out so that nobody reads "a delete archives" as covering more than it does.

Cancelling a plan is not a delete either

When a paid plan ends the account returns to the free plan and nothing is removed: the core CRM keeps working and your leads, contacts and history are where you left them. See "How do I upgrade, add users or cancel?".