# Entities URL: https://docs.clatri.com/en/entities/ > How entities work in Clatri: your personal entity, business entities and the businesses inside them, and how to share them with a link code. When you sign up for Clatri, the first thing you do — without realizing it — is create a **personal entity**. It's your default profile: your country, your currencies, your tax ID, your language. Everything you record from that moment on — expenses, medications, tasks, appointments — is associated with that entity. But an entity is not just a profile. It's an **isolated data space**. Each entity has its own chat, its own calendar, its own bank accounts, its own history. If you have an incorporated company, its movements shouldn't mix with your personal expenses. That's why business-type entities exist. The rule is simple: **a user can have a single personal entity and multiple business entities**. You switch between them from the entity selector in the chat app bar or from the dashboards, and each one works as an isolated data space. ## Signup: you first, then your business During onboarding, Clatri guides you step by step: 1. **Country and currencies** — defines where you operate and in what currencies. If you handle crypto, you can register it too, although the system treats it as investments, not as currencies 2. **Tax ID** — your personal tax identifier (optional but recommended) 3. **Health data** — biological sex and date of birth (optional) 4. **Do you have a business?** — if you answer yes, Clatri asks for your company info That last step is where the system branches. And the key question is the one onboarding asks you: ***"Does your business have a tax ID different from yours?"*** ## A new entity or a business inside yours The question isn't bureaucratic. It decides **where the bookkeeping** for that activity lives, and that decision can't be undone with a switch. **Legal entity — the business has its own tax ID, different from yours.** It's a separate legal entity: it invoices in its own name, opens accounts in its own name, and answers for its own obligations. In Clatri that's a **separate business entity**, with its own accounts, its own books and its own **Balance sheet**. You create it yourself, by hand, in **Settings → Entities → Create**. No agent tool can create an entity, and that's deliberate: being born as a legal entity is your decision, not something Clatri should infer from a sentence in the chat. **Same tax ID — the business operates under your name.** This is the case of the freelancer, the startup that's just beginning, the informal business, the activity registered in your own name. Legally there's no second person: the bank accounts are yours and the income is yours. Clatri reflects that reality and **doesn't create a new entity**: it creates a **business inside your personal entity**. You can have several — a consulting practice and a shop live side by side without getting in each other's way. The same mechanism works inside a company. A **business entity** can also contain **business lines**: segments under a single tax ID — a restaurant that also runs a catering line. It's the same piece, read differently. In one case it separates a person's activities; in the other, a company's segments. Both live in **My businesses** — see [My businesses](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/business/). ### What to use in each case | If it's… | Use | |---|---| | A one-off activity that ends (a trip, an event, a client) | **Project** | | An ongoing business or line INSIDE the current entity, without its own accounts | **Business** (My businesses) | | A new formal company with its own tax ID, accounts and separate books | Business-type **entity** | ## The entity is the accounting boundary This is the idea that holds up everything else, and it's worth saying plainly: **the entity is the limit of the bookkeeping**. Bank accounts, cards, **Prepaid balances**, bank connections, statements and transactions **belong to one entity and don't cross over to another**. There's no view that adds up two entities, and that's on purpose: if your company and you are two different persons under the law, adding up their balances would produce a number that means nothing. A **business** inside an entity is something else: it's an **analytical dimension**, not a separate set of books. Specifically: - **It has no accounts or balances of its own.** The money is still in the entity's accounts. - **Its result is derived**, not kept separately: it's what comes out of the income and expenses you tag to that business. - **A movement can be split across several business lines.** A rent that serves both the restaurant and the catering is divided between the two, and the entity's total doesn't change by a cent. - **Deleting a business doesn't delete or reclassify its transactions.** The movements stay there, in the entity, where they always were; the only thing that disappears is the tag. That's why assigning to a business is always explicit. Clatri never deduces it from the bank account the money went through: a payment arriving in your usual account says nothing about which business it belongs to. The [reports](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/reports/) are then read at two levels — the entity's total, and the breakdown by business within it. ## Sharing entities Clatri lets you share an entity with other users. To invite someone you need their **link code**: once you have it, you enter it on the invite screen and define what access level they'll have. ### The link code The link code is a short token each user generates from **Settings > Link code**. It replaces searching by email: nobody can find you — or even know you have a Clatri account — unless you deliberately share your code with them. Its properties: - **You generate it** — the code doesn't exist until you create it, and only the people you give it to have it. It isn't derived from your email or any public identifier. - **You decide which entities it shares** — when you generate it, you select which of your entities (the personal one, your businesses) are available. Whoever uses the code will only see the ones you chose, nothing more. - **It expires on its own** — it lives for about 7 days and then expires. Within that window it can be used several times. - **It's revocable** — generating a new code deactivates the previous one instantly. Changing your selection of entities also requires generating a new one. To invite someone, you ask for their link code, type it on the invite screen and Clatri resolves it to that person. From there you go on to choose the permission and the domains. The same code lets someone **link you as a contact**: it's the only piece through which one Clatri user finds another, and always deliberately and revocably. ### Permission levels - **Owner** — full access, can manage the entity and invite other users - **Editor** — can view and edit data within allowed domains - **Viewer** — read-only access ### Access domains In addition to the permission level, you define **which domains** the person can see: - **Everything** — full access to all domains - **Finances** — accounts, transactions, investments, debts - **Health** — conditions, medications, body metrics. You can share all health data or just menstrual cycle tracking, without exposing the rest of the medical information - **Administration** — spaces, pages, boards, tasks, habits, calendar, contacts - **Chat** — conversation history You can combine them: for example, share only Finances with your accountant, or Finances and Administration with your business partner. ### Invites When you share an entity, the other user receives an **invite** they can accept or reject. Only if they accept does the entity appear in their entity list with the permissions you defined. This protects both sides: you control who has access, and the other person decides whether they want to receive that information. ### Use cases - **Couples** — share the personal entity with Finances access to manage the books together - **Companies** — share the business entity with employees, each with permissions tuned to their role - **External accountant** — viewer access to Finances so they can review without modifying - **Project partner** — editor access to a business entity so they can log transactions, manage tasks, and see pending items with you - **Menstrual cycle tracking** — Clatri lets you share only period tracking with another person, without exposing the rest of the health data ## Linking contacts to Clatri users Sharing an entity gives you access to another person's data. **Linking a contact** is the reverse operation: it connects someone to your own work structure. Both use the same piece — the link code — seen from different sides. Your contact book lives inside each entity. A contact can be a person or a company, and it can exist only as a local card — a name, a phone number, an address — or be **linked to a real Clatri entity**. To link it, you ask that person for their link code and enter it from the contact's card. Clatri resolves the code and shows you the entities that person chose to share: you can link the contact to their personal entity or to one of their businesses. Linking a contact turns it from a static card into a live connection. Today that connection lets you reliably associate it with the records where it appears — like the counterparty of an expense or the holder of a subscription — without depending on the name matching exactly. Later on, that same connection will let you invite them directly to your Spaces and assign them tasks with no intermediate steps. See [Contacts](https://docs.clatri.com/en/space/people/).