How to track parent/child relationships in your CRM with Streak

Tracking multiple deals with the same client—or linking people and companies across workflows—can get messy fast. You risk duplicating records or losing the bigger picture.

In CRM terms, this is a “parent-child” or “1:many” relationship: one record related to many others. Think repeat deals with the same customer, multiple buyers per listing, or a creator working with several brands.

Streak gives you flexible tools to manage these relationships in a way that works for your business—but having multiple options can be overwhelming.

In this post, we’ll break down common patterns and share advice from Zach, a member of our Customer Success team, to help you structure things clearly.

Signs you need to track parent/child relationships in your CRM

Most CRMs are built around the idea that each record or deal is a single, self-contained opportunity. But that breaks down when you start working with repeat clients, contacts who appear in multiple deals or pipelines, or records connected to the same company, property, or referral source.

Here are a few signs you may need to track parent/child relationships in your CRM:

• You’re tracking multiple deals for the same customer or opportunity.
• You work with both individuals and companies in the same process.
• You connect people across different pipelines (like a home buyer and multiple property listings).
• You want to view the full history of a contact’s interactions, not just one deal at a time.

In Streak, you can model these relationships using tools like linked boxes, contacts, and organizations—without losing the visibility or flexibility of your pipelines.

Streak toolbox for tracking related CRM records

Streak offers a flexible set of features and tools to help you track related records and relationships. 

Here's a quick overview of how each Streak feature or tool fits into a parent/child or 1:many CRM structure:

• Pipelines: the process you’re tracking—like a sales cycle, onboarding flow, or hiring process.
• Boxes (records): the individual records that move through that process. A box might represent a deal project, client, property, or task. These are sometimes referred to as "opportunities."
• Linked boxes: connect related records across different pipelines—like a home buyer and the properties they’re interested in, or a creator and the brands they work with.
• Contacts: the people involved. A single contact can be added to many boxes and pipelines. Contact pages show you a contact’s full history—every deal they’re part of, plus communication and interactions across your team.
• Organizations: companies you're working with. Organizations can be added to boxes, and have multiple contacts associated with each one. Organization pages show your team’s full history of deals and emails with a company.
• Saved views: pipeline filters that let you find and group boxes based on linked records, helping you focus on certain relationships or connections.

With these tools, you can create clear, flexible structures and data models that support your real-world relationships and workflows—without forcing everything into a one-size-fits-all mold.

How to track related records in your CRM (with examples)

Real-world relationships rarely fit neatly into a single pipeline. Here are four examples of how real businesses use Streak’s tools—like linked boxes, contacts, and organizations—to track related records across sales, operations, and services.

Multiple sales opportunities with the same customer

A landscaping company often completes multiple projects for the same homeowner. For example, a client may want to plant trees, then later in the season install a water feature. Or a client may hire the landscaping company to do spring planting each year.

Here’s how they track landscaping clients and projects in Streak:

• Use one pipeline for residential projects, and another for commercial clients if the processes differ.
• For repeat customers, create a new record for each project to keep records and timelines separate.
• Add the client's contact to each record so you can view all their projects and communication history on their contact page.
• Track addresses and project or service types in pipeline columns so you can filter and view by project types and properties.

Connecting people in a marketplace

A Streak customer helps students apply to universities. Each university is a client, and each student is an individual going through a college application process.

Here’s how they track student applications and university clients in Streak:

• Use one pipeline to track universities and another for student applications.
• Link each student’s record to the university they’re applying to. This allows you to see if a student has applied to multiple universities, and a full list of students who have applied to every university.
• Add a contact for each student and for university reps to track application history and communication timelines.
• Add an organization to each university to track emails with everyone at the institution.

Tracking real estate buyers and listings

Real estate agents work with both buyers and sellers. Buyers may look at multiple properties, and sellers will have multiple people interested in their properties.

Here’s how realtors track buyers and listings in Streak:

• Create a buyer pipe/line (record = individual buyer) and a seller pipeline (record = property address).
• Link each buyer to the properties they’re viewing. This allows you to see all the properties someone is viewing, and all the potential buyers for a certain property.
• Use contact pages to view the full email history across pipelines.

Managing influencer marketing creators and campaigns

Agencies manage relationships between creators and brands. One creator may have deals with several brands, and brands often work with more than one creator.

Many Streak customers use the following structure to track influencer marketing campaigns, creators, and brands:

• Create a pipeline for creators or talent, a pipeline for brands, and a pipeline for campaigns.
• Link creator boxes to the brands they partner with. When campaigns launch, link creators and a brand to each campaign.
• Use linked boxes and saved views to navigate those relationships easily. For example, create a saved view of all active campaigns for a certain brand. 

Best practices for setting up parent/child relationships in your CRM

As Zach from our Success team shared, there’s no single “correct” setup—it depends on your process, what you’re tracking, and how different those processes are. That said, here are a few of his go-to principles for helping customers set things up clearly and effectively:

Start by understanding what you’re tracking

Before recommending pipelines or columns, Zach asks teams: “What are you actually tracking—and how different are those workflows?” If the steps for residential vs. commercial clients are significantly different, they should probably live in separate pipelines. If the process is nearly identical, a single pipeline with a dropdown column might be easier to manage.

Use linked boxes when you need to track more than a label

Dropdown columns or tags work well for simple categorization. But if you need to track conversations, contacts, or progress for a related record—like a student’s university, or a property a buyer is viewing—use a linked box. You’ll be able to click into the related record and see everything in one place.

Avoid clutter by turning off autoboxing for some teams

For teams managing multiple projects with the same client (like landscaping), Zach often recommends turning off autoboxing. You don’t want emails about a fountain project showing up in the box for a tree-planting job. Instead, manually add relevant emails to each box, and use the contact page to view the full conversation history.

Help your team understand the structure

One challenge with flexible tools is that users get overwhelmed or don’t understand how everything connects. Zach encourages teams to focus on clear naming conventions for boxes, keep pipelines process-specific, and lean on saved views to surface the right information.

Watch for overbuilding

Zach also cautions against overcomplicating things: “People sometimes want to create a new pipeline or link everything, but simpler is usually better—especially for onboarding new teammates.”

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between linked boxes and a dropdown column?

Use a dropdown when you only need to label or categorize a record. Use a linked box when you want to track full details for a related record—like emails, contacts, and deal stages.

How do I know if I should use one pipeline or multiple?

If your processes are meaningfully different (like residential vs. commercial sales), use separate pipelines. If the workflow is the same, one pipeline with a dropdown column may be easier to manage.

Can I see everything a contact is involved in?

Yes. A contact page in Streak shows every pipeline and record they're part of, plus their full email history with your team.

When should I avoid using autoboxing?

If the same contact is involved in multiple deals or projects, autoboxing can clutter boxes with unrelated emails. Turning it off helps you manually control what communication goes where.

Why should I add contacts or organizations to a record?

Adding contacts and organizations links your team’s emails and interactions to that record. It also lets you view the full history of someone’s involvement across pipelines—from deal history to communication—with one click.