Folkbase keeps one record for every person who works with you, employees and contractors alike. The directory is the list of those records. It answers questions about your people from the source, not from a copy someone exported last month.
One record per person
A person gets exactly one record in the workspace, and it stays theirs from the first day to the last. Access, tasks, and the history of every change attach to it. When a candidate accepts an offer, the record is created from the application, so the name, email, and application history are already in place. Nobody types them in a second time.
Each record holds the fields people teams reach for most:
- Job title and team
- Manager, so reporting lines are part of the data
- Location, for anything that depends on where someone works
- Start date
- Status, covered below
- Grants: every tool the person can open, the person who granted it, and the role behind it
Four statuses
Every record carries one status. It tells you where a person stands in the workspace at a glance.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending invite | The person has been added and has not yet joined the workspace. |
| Active | The person has joined and works in the workspace. |
| Blocked | The person is held out of the workspace. The record stays intact. |
| Archived | The person has left. The record is kept with its full history. |
Statuses move with the lifecycle, and each transition, from activation to exit, is logged with who ran it, when, and why. An archived record is never thrown away. It still answers what a former employee held and when each grant closed.
Teams and reporting lines
Admins create and manage teams. Each record names a team and a manager, and that structure decides what people see in the workspace. Managers see their own team, including its onboarding, offboarding, access, and analytics. Staff see their own tasks and their own access. Contractors get a narrower, scoped view. The full breakdown lives in roles and permissions.
A transfer is an edit to one record. The new team, the new manager, and what that manager can see all follow from it. There is no second system to update and no org chart to redraw by hand.
Filter by any field
The directory filters on anything stored on a record. Team, location, status, manager, start date, and the tools a person holds all work as filters, and they combine.
Who in Berlin has GitHub? Which contractors still hold a Notion grant? Who on the Design team is still a pending invite? Each one is a filter, and the answer reflects the records as they stand right now.
Because grants live on the record, a tool filter shows who holds access today, not who was supposed to. When you need that answer frozen with a date on it, an access review snapshots every active grant into a dated review.
Why not a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet of people is a copy. It is accurate the day it is made and drifts every time someone joins, moves, or leaves without a matching edit. The access column drifts fastest, because nobody updates it when an account is opened in a hurry.
The directory does not drift that way, because it is not a report about the records. It is the records. When onboarding starts, the pending grants appear on the person's record. When a grant closes, the record shows the time it closed. There is no second place to keep in sync.
The directory is the record itself, not a copy of it.
The directory is included in every plan, including Starter, which is free for small teams. You can start with the directory alone and add other modules later. Nothing requires a migration.