CRM for UK organisations
Everything you know about a customer, in one place.
For small and medium organisations that have outgrown spreadsheets and shared inboxes but do not want an enterprise system, an implementation partner and a six month project to run their business.
Do not take our word for it
Three things you can check before you trust us
Every claim on this page is one you can test yourself, on the free plan, on the first afternoon. These are the three worth testing first.
Check that you can leave
Sign up, put a spreadsheet in, and export it straight back out. It works on the free plan on day one, because a portability promise you can only test after you have paid for it is not a promise, it is a hope.
Check where it actually lives
Your organisation gets a database of its own, in the European Union or the United States, chosen once and fixed from then on. Nobody here can open it without a reason, a second approver, and a line in your own audit trail.
Check what is missing
The roadmap names what is not built and what we have decided against, by name. Read it before you sign up rather than discovering it in the third week, which is the point at which it becomes expensive.
The problem
The system of record is four systems, and none of them is the record
Almost every organisation between two and two hundred people arrives at the same arrangement without ever choosing it.
The spreadsheet that became the database
It started as a list of leads for one quarter. It now has eleven tabs, four people who know which one is current, and a column called Notes that contains the only record of a conversation that decided a contract.
The inbox that became the filing cabinet
What was agreed with a customer is in an email. Which email depends on who was on the thread. When that person is on leave, the answer to a simple question takes two days and a guess.
The calendar no one can read across
Appointments exist, and so do the jobs they relate to, but not in the same place. Whether a customer has been visited twice this month is a question you can only answer by asking somebody.
The knowledge that leaves with the person
The most valuable thing a small organisation owns is what it knows about the people it works with. Held this way, that knowledge belongs to whoever happens to remember it, and it walks out with them.
None of this is a discipline problem
It is what happens when the tools that are easy to start with have no way to hold a relationship, and the tools that can hold a relationship are priced and shaped for organisations ten times the size. Consonas exists for the gap in between: a real system of record that a five person business can be running properly by the end of an afternoon.
Built and running
What it does today
Consonas is early. This is the working product instead of a plan for one. Everything below exists, runs, and is in use.
Relationships
People and organisations as one family of records, with the connections between them, a timeline of everything that happened, and consent recorded as a fact instead of a tick box.
About relationshipsLeads
Capture an enquiry with where it came from, qualify it in your own words, and convert it in one step. Then see which sources actually produce customers.
About leadsSales
A pipeline with the stages your business actually uses, a record of how long each opportunity sat where, and a forecast weighted by stage.
About salesWork and calendar
Tasks against any record, a daily view of what is late and what is due, and appointments that tell you about a clash instead of refusing to make one.
About work and calendarSearch and import
Search across everything you are allowed to see. Bring a spreadsheet in with a preview before anything is written, and take it all back out whenever you want.
About search and importReporting
The measures a small organisation looks at on a Monday: work in progress, what closed, what is coming, what is late, and where enquiries come from.
About reportingThe difference
Your data is separated by the architecture, not by a filter
Most systems of this kind keep every customer's records in one shared database and rely on each query carrying the right condition. It is a reasonable way to build software and almost everybody does it. It has one failure mode, and the failure mode is that a single query written without that condition returns one customer's information to another.
In Consonas, each organisation has a database of its own. Not its own row, its own table or its own column, but its own database, which no one else's requests can reach. A query written wrongly returns the wrong answer to you instead of someone else's information to a stranger.
It also means an upgrade arrives per organisation rather than as one overnight migration across everybody at once, and that a busy customer cannot slow a quiet one down.
- Isolation
- One database per organisation, not one row in a shared table. Another customer's request has no path to your data, because there is no shared table for it to reach.
- Region
- European Union or United States, chosen when the organisation is created and fixed from then on. UK organisations should choose the European Union: it is the closest region and carries the data protection posture UK law expects.
- Schema
- Every organisation carries its own journal of applied migrations, so an upgrade reaches your data when your organisation is next used rather than in one overnight window that either works or does not.
- Support access
- Nobody here can open your organisation without a stated reason, a second approver, and an entry in your own audit trail that you can read.
- Sign in
- Passkeys, two factor codes, and SAML single sign on for organisations that need their identity provider to be the source of truth.
- Export
- A complete copy of everything you hold, generated on request, on every plan, whether or not you pay us.
The two alternatives
Against what you are probably using now
Including the row where the spreadsheet wins, because a comparison table with no losing rows in it is an advert rather than a comparison.
| What is being compared | A spreadsheet | An enterprise CRM | Consonas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Minutes. It is already open on somebody's screen. | A project. Discovery, configuration, a partner, and a date some months out. | Minutes. Create an organisation, import a spreadsheet, invite two colleagues. |
| What a customer record is | A row. Anything that does not fit a column goes in a notes cell or an email no one else can see. | A rich object with fifty fields, most of which your business will never fill in. | A person or an organisation, with the connections between them, a timeline, files, and the fields you actually use. |
| When two people edit at once | One of them wins and neither is told. | Handled, with a record of who changed what. | Handled, with a record of who changed what, on every plan including the free one. |
| Who can see what | Everybody with the link, or nobody, depending on where it is saved. | Configurable in detail, usually by somebody whose job that is. | Roles you define in your own words, record ownership, and a separate grant for the sensitive ones. |
| Where the data is | Wherever the file happens to live, which is often three places. | In a shared database with every other customer, separated by a condition on each query. | In a database of its own, in the region you chose, that no one else's requests can reach. |
| Getting your data back out | It is already a file, which is the one thing a spreadsheet is genuinely better at. | Usually possible. Occasionally a professional services engagement. | Complete, at any time, without asking and without a fee, on every plan. |
| What it costs to try | Nothing. | A conversation with somebody whose target you are. | Nothing. Three people, no card, no time limit, no sales call. |
In practice
Three things that decide whether a system gets used
Software of this kind does not fail because a feature is missing. It fails because getting started was too much work, because the thing people needed was two clicks too far away, or because nobody trusted what it said.
Getting in
An import you can see the result of before it happens
Bring in the spreadsheet you already have. Consonas reads it, matches the columns it recognises, and shows you exactly what it is about to create, what it is about to update, and what it is going to skip and why.
Nothing is written until you approve that preview. If it is wrong, fix the file and run it again. Because the first pass writes nothing, there is no half finished import to unpick, which is the usual reason a migration gets abandoned halfway and the spreadsheet quietly survives another year.
Knowing where things stand
A timeline someone else can read without ringing you
Every record carries a timeline of what happened and when. A lead converted, a note added, a file uploaded, a stage changed, an appointment booked, a message sent, a consent given or withdrawn.
The test it is built to pass is simple: somebody picking up a relationship for the first time should be able to read down it and know where things stand, without asking the colleague who is on holiday. Separately, and underneath it, there is an audit trail of who changed what, which no one can edit, including us.
Trusting what it says
Permission that is about records, not just about screens
Roles are defined in your own words rather than chosen from a fixed list, because the word your business uses is the word your staff will look for. Records have owners. Sensitive records need a grant that is separate from the role, so giving someone the ability to do their job does not quietly give them everything.
The distinction the product is careful about is between something you are not allowed to do and something your plan does not include. They are different answers to different questions, and a system that returns the same message for both teaches people to stop reading the message.
Where it lives
You choose the region once, and then it is fixed
You choose when you create the organisation
European Union or United States. It is a decision made once, at the point where it is cheap to make, instead of a setting to find later.
It is fixed from then on
Your data stays in that region. There is no setting anyone can change afterwards, including us, because a region that can be changed quietly is not a commitment about where your data is.
Every access is recorded, ours included
Support cannot open your organisation without a stated reason, a second approver and an entry in your own audit trail. You can read that trail.
Export is a portability commitment instead of a feature, so it is on every plan, including the free one, whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Which is the whole reason to check it before you commit five years of relationships to anybody.
Pricing
Free, properly
A two person consultancy should be able to run its whole customer relationship on the free plan indefinitely without feeling squeezed. That is the intention, so the things that make a free plan feel like a trap are not there.
- Three people, one thousand contacts and organisations, 500 MB of files.
- The complete core: relationships, leads, one pipeline, tasks, the calendar, the timeline, search, import and reporting.
- The audit trail, consent records, subject access tooling and two factor sign in are included and always will be. They are obligations, not upsells.
- A full export of everything you hold, at any time, whether you pay us or not.
- No card. No time limit. No sales call.
Going over a limit means you are told, and that the limit applies to adding more. It does not mean anything is deleted or hidden. Stopping paying drops you to Free rather than out.
What is built
And what is not, by name
Describing software you intend to write as though it exists produces signups that leave within a fortnight, so here is the state of it.
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Built
Relationships, leads, sales, work and the calendar
The core of the product. People and organisations as one family of records, enquiries captured and qualified and converted, a pipeline with your own stages, tasks against any record, and appointments that report a clash rather than refusing to make one.
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Built
Search, import, export and reporting
Search across everything you are allowed to see. Import with a preview you approve before a single row is written. Export everything, free, at any time. A dashboard of the measures a small organisation actually looks at on a Monday.
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Built
Permissions, the audit trail and consent
Roles defined in your own words, record ownership, a separate grant for sensitive records, a record of who changed what and when, and consent held as a fact with a date and a source rather than as a tick box.
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Built
Email, conversations and follow ups
Messages held against the relationship they concern. Sequences that stop the moment someone replies. A booking page that writes into the same calendar your colleagues are already in.
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Built
Marketing, service and the customer portal
Audiences that keep themselves current, campaigns that check consent for every person at the moment of sending, matters with targets counted in working hours, and a portal where a customer sees their own enquiries and nothing else. On Professional and above.
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Built
Projects, invoices and operations
Work planned and delivered, invoices numbered without gaps and settled by recorded payments, credit notes that cannot exceed what remains uncredited, and contracts you can require a second pair of eyes on. Bought as modules beside a plan rather than granted by one, and sold from Standard upwards.
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Being built
More connectors, and deeper reporting
Google and Microsoft calendars connect both ways. Accounting is still an export rather than a connection. The list of systems we read from is shorter than it will be, and the reporting answers the common questions rather than every question.
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Not started
Accounting, payroll, and a second general ledger
Not planned, and that is deliberate. Cost and headcount belong to the system that owns them, and nothing here reads either: the accounting connectors are named and not built. Building a second general ledger is how a CRM becomes a worse version of two products.
The roadmap page carries the same list with more detail, and is updated when something moves rather than quarterly.
Seventeen trades
Written for your trade, not translated into it
Organisations of roughly two to two hundred people who need to keep track of customers and the work that follows. We write a page for each kind of organisation instead of one page you have to translate into your own words.
Professional services
Client work, repeat engagements, and being able to answer what was said to whom without asking the person who said it.
Read the pageConsultancy
A small pipeline where each opportunity is large, slow and personal, and where losing one matters more than the average conversion rate does.
Read the pageRecruitment
Two relationships to manage at once, clients and candidates, in one system rather than in two that disagree.
Read the pageMaintenance and facilities
Sites, contracts and jobs that come round again, where the question is usually when somebody was last there.
Read the pageThe first afternoon
What using it actually looks like, hour by hour
Not a demonstration and not a project. This is what the day looks like for an organisation of six people moving off a spreadsheet.
Ten minutes: create the organisation
An email address, a name, and a region. The region is the only decision that cannot be changed later, because your organisation's database is physically created in it. United Kingdom organisations should choose the European Union, which is the closest region available and carries the posture UK data protection law expects.
Behind that minute, a database is created that exists only for you. Not a row in a shared table with your name in a column. That is the decision the whole product is built on, and it is the one that cannot be added later.
Twenty minutes: decide five or six relationship types
Client, prospect, supplier, referrer, and whatever else your trade actually uses. This is the shortest task on the list and the one that decides whether the system is useful in a year, because every saved view, filter and report is built on it afterwards.
Each sector page carries a modelling section naming the types for that trade, which connections need dates, and the two or three custom fields worth having. Reading the nearest one is the highest return ten minutes available.
Forty minutes: import the spreadsheet
Bring the messy one instead of cleaning it first. The preview shows exactly what will be created, row by row, before anything is written, and cleaning against that is faster than cleaning in the abstract.
Import a hundred rows, open five at random, and check that what was created is what you meant. The question that matters is whether a row describing a person and the company they work for became two records and a connection, because it should have.
Ten minutes: roles, and two factor
Before anybody is invited rather than after. An invitation carries a role, and most organisations give everybody everything on day one and live with it for two years.
Require two factor for the whole organisation while you are there. It is on this plan, an owner can require it, and it is the single change that most reduces the chance of the story that starts with a reused password.
Twenty minutes: put in what is actually due
Every follow up somebody asked for, every renewal, every recurring visit or review. This exercise reliably surfaces two or three commitments that were not written down anywhere and at least one that is already late.
That is usually the moment the product justifies itself, and it happens before anything clever has been configured.
One minute: run an export
On the first afternoon, before you have anything to lose. It produces a file that opens without our software, and it converts a promise on a website into something you have seen. The only time you can safely find out what an export produces is when you do not need it to work.
Then leave it alone for a fortnight
Do not configure pipelines, sequences or reporting yet. Two weeks of ordinary use will tell you what your stages actually are, which fields nobody fills in, and where the work really goes quiet. Every one of those is a better answer than a planning session produces.
Deciding
Six questions worth asking us and everyone else
Every one of them has a checkable answer on this site. Ask the same six of any supplier you are considering.
Can I get my data out before I put it in?
Complete export, free, on every plan including the free one, at any time, without asking, including after you stop paying. If a supplier's answer involves a support ticket, a paid tier or a waiting period, the portability promise is decorative.
What does the product refuse to do?
Every product page here carries a section naming what that part does not do, and the roadmap has a whole state for things decided against permanently. A supplier who cannot answer this has either not thought about it or decided not to tell you.
Where is my data, and can it move?
The European Union or the United States, chosen at signup and fixed from that moment because the database is created there. There is no United Kingdom region. We would rather write that plainly than let someone discover it afterwards. If the question is coming from a regulator rather than from you, the Information Commissioner's Office is the body whose guidance a United Kingdom organisation is reading.
Who at the supplier can read my records?
Nobody, in the ordinary course. Access happens where you have asked for support that requires it, is limited to the people who need it, and is recorded. Your data does not train models, ours or anybody else's, and is never sold in any form.
What is the evidence when something goes wrong?
An audit trail written in the same moment as the change it records, readable by you, not editable by anyone including us, on every plan including the free one. If a supplier puts this behind a tier, understand what that means: the evidence arrives with an invoice.
What happens if the supplier stops?
The right question to ask anybody our size, and the answer does not depend on our funding position. Keep your own export, on your own storage, on a schedule you control. We would give the same advice about any small supplier including ourselves, and it is worth more to you than any reassurance.
Not for everybody
When you should buy something else
Written here rather than at the end of a trial, because a limitation discovered on a website costs thirty seconds and the same limitation discovered after a migration costs three weeks.
If you bill by recorded time
Time can be recorded against a project, in minutes, on a day, with a note, on the delivery module, and there is a view of what each person has recorded against their capacity. What there is not is billing from it: no rates, no job costing, and no invoice raised from recorded time. If billing by recorded time is the core of your business, an agency or practice management product is the right purchase and we would rather say so here than lose you at the end of a trial.
If scheduling vans is your core problem
No dispatch board, no route optimisation, no engineer application with an offline mode. A field service product is what you want. The maintenance sector page says the same thing on its own page rather than only here.
If you need accounting or payroll in the same system
Decided against permanently. Those carry obligations and testing regimes that would take over the product, and doing them adequately is worse than not doing them. Consonas connects to the systems that do them properly.
If your procurement requires a certification
We hold no SOC 2 and no ISO 27001, and there is no published penetration test. That is the first thing on the diligence section of the legal page, because a process requiring one of those is a process we do not currently pass, and finding out at the end wastes more of your time than ours.
If your people work without a signal
It works on a phone as a web application. There is no native application and no offline mode. For anybody regularly in plant rooms and basements that is a genuine reason to choose something else rather than a detail.
If you need clinical, legal or property specific systems
This is not a clinical records system, not practice management and not property management. Each of those sector pages says so directly, before it says anything else, and every one of them is more useful to you for saying it.
About this site
This page is longer than a homepage needs to be, and that is the argument
A note about the writing, because the way a supplier sells you something is evidence about how it will behave once you have paid it.
There is no wall of customer logos
Consonas is early enough that a logo wall would have to be assembled out of goodwill, and a case study written this early is a story about somebody who agreed to appear in it. So there are none anywhere on this site. The cost of that is real and it falls on you: nothing here reassures you that someone else has already taken the risk you are weighing up, and for some readers that alone is a good enough reason to stop at this paragraph. The customers page says so at length, and sets out what a story would have to contain before we would publish one.
There are no numbers, because we would have had to invent them
No hours saved, no percentage more closed, no average anything. We do not hold that evidence, and the figures you read on sites like this one are usually one customer's good quarter written up as a law of nature. What stands in their place is claims you can check on the first afternoon: an export you can run before lunch, a roadmap that names what is missing, and a free plan that lets you test both without speaking to anybody.
The limitations arrive before the benefits
Every product page here names what that part refuses to do, and the section above this one tells you when to buy from somebody else. It makes a worse advert and a better use of your afternoon. Nothing on this site asks for your email address before it will tell you something either: the prices are on the pricing page, the gaps are on the roadmap, and there is no form standing between you and either.
What sticks
One choice today is permanent, and the rest cost less than the meeting about them
Most of the deliberation that goes into buying something like this is spent on decisions that can be changed again on a Thursday afternoon. These are the four that are worth the thought, and what each one costs you when it goes wrong.
The region, which neither you nor we can undo
Your organisation's database is created in the European Union or the United States at the moment you sign up, and it stays where it was made. If you are in the United Kingdom, choose the European Union. Getting this one wrong is not a setting to correct later: it means creating a second organisation and importing into it, which is an afternoon on day one and a fortnight in year two.
Whether the spreadsheet keeps running alongside
The safe sounding answer is to run both for a few weeks. The cost of it is that you now hold two records of the truth and no rule about which one wins, and the one people update is whichever is already open. If you do run both, decide on the first morning which is authoritative and put the other one somewhere read only, because deciding that later means reconciling instead.
Who gets invited first
The instinct is to start with whoever is most enthusiastic. The more useful choice is whoever is most sceptical, because they will find in three days what an enthusiast will not mention for three months. Free gives you three people. Spend one of them on someone who will tell you plainly that the thing they needed was two clicks too far away.
When to pay for anything
Later than you are expecting to. Start on Free and let a limit, or something you find you cannot do, tell you which plan you need, instead of choosing one in advance from a table of ticks. Nothing you build on the free plan has to be unwound to move up, and if you later stop paying you drop back to Free rather than out.
From the other side
The person who has to use it on Tuesday did not choose it
Whoever is reading this page is usually not the person who will spend the most hours in the product. That gap is where systems of this kind quietly die, and it is worth knowing what the view looks like from the other end of it.
What your colleague is actually asking
Not whether the architecture is sound, and not where the data is held. They are asking whether this adds a step to a job they already know how to do, and whether the thing they need at half past four is where they expect it to be. Someone who decides the answer is no goes back to the inbox, and the inbox wins that argument every time, because it is already open on their screen.
What the product can do about that
Roles are named in your words rather than ours, so people look for the word their trade already uses. Search covers everything a person is allowed to see, so the first instinct is the one that works. A record's timeline is written to be read by somebody who was not there, which is the whole difference between looking something up and ringing whoever was.
What it cannot
Someone still has to type into it. There is no arrangement in which a system of record fills itself in, and a supplier who implies otherwise is showing you the version of the product that only exists in a demonstration. It is also another window in a browser rather than an application on a phone, which is a genuine cost to anybody who spends the day away from a desk.
Which changes what the buyer should watch
The fortnight after the import decides this, and it is decided by whether the answers people need are in there rather than by anything you configure. Put the follow ups in, put the renewals in, then ask someone who was not part of the decision to go and find one. What they say next is the only evaluation that matters.
Before you sign up
What people ask before the first afternoon
Is the free plan a trial?
No. Three people, a thousand contacts and organisations, and 500 MB of files, with no card and no time limit. A two person consultancy can run its whole customer relationship on it indefinitely. What Free does not include is stated plainly on the pricing page rather than discovered later.
What happens when we go over a free limit?
You are told, and the limit applies to adding more rather than to what you already hold. Nothing is deleted, nothing is hidden, and your existing records stay readable and exportable. The same is true if you stop paying: you drop to Free instead of losing access.
Where is our data held?
In the European Union or the United States, whichever you choose when you create your organisation. It is fixed from then on and your data stays in that region. UK organisations should choose the European Union: it is the closest region available and carries the data protection posture UK law expects.
Can someone at Consonas read our records?
Not without a stated reason, a second approver, and an entry in your own audit trail. Support access is a two person action that leaves evidence in your organisation, not a switch somebody flips. You can read that trail yourself.
Can we get our data out?
At any time, complete, without asking and without a fee. Export is a portability commitment instead of a feature, so it is on every plan including Free. The point of saying so on the homepage is that it is the thing you should check before you put five years of relationships into anyone's system.
How hard is it to move off a spreadsheet?
Import takes a spreadsheet, shows you exactly what it is about to create and what it is about to skip, and writes nothing until you approve that preview. If the preview is wrong, fix the file and run it again. Nothing is written on the first attempt, so there is nothing to undo.
Do you do accounting or payroll?
No, and we do not intend to. Cost and headcount belong to the system you already use for those, and nothing here reads either yet: the accounting connectors are named on the roadmap and not built, so on the invoicing module what reaches your ledger today is a CSV export rather than a connection. Building a second general ledger is how a CRM becomes a worse version of two products.
How early is early?
The relationships, leads, sales, work, calendar, search, import, export and reporting are built and running, on every plan. Marketing, service and the customer portal are built and start at Professional. Projects and invoicing are built and are modules you buy beside a plan of Standard or above rather than a plan you move to. The roadmap says what is not built yet, by name, rather than describing it as coming soon.
Do we need someone technical to set this up?
No. Signing up creates the organisation and the database that belongs to it. There is nothing to install, no server to keep, and no configuration file. The two jobs that need a person instead of a tool are deciding what your relationship types are called and deciding who gets which role, and both of those are questions about your business rather than about software. If you can prepare a spreadsheet, you can run the import, because the preview tells you what is wrong before anything is written.
Why is there no United Kingdom region?
There are two regions, the European Union and the United States, and a United Kingdom one is not among them. UK organisations should choose the European Union: it is the closest region available and carries the data protection posture UK law expects. We would rather write that on the homepage than let somebody meet it on the signup form after they have decided.
Does it work on a phone?
It is a web application and it runs in a phone browser. There is no native application in an app store and no offline mode, so somebody standing in a plant room with no signal cannot use it while they are there. If most of your work happens out of signal, that is a reason to choose something else instead of a detail to discover later.
We are two people. Is this more system than we need?
Possibly. The test we would apply is whether anyone has asked a question this week that could only be answered by ringing a colleague, and whether anything was forgotten that someone had promised. If neither has happened, your spreadsheet is still doing its job and you should keep it. If both happened before Wednesday, the spreadsheet stopped being the record some time ago and no one has said so out loud.
Why should a small organisation care how it is built?
Because the common way of building this puts every customer's records in one database and relies on each query carrying the right condition. That works until one query is written without it. You will never see that decision on a pricing page, and it is the decision that determines whether somebody else's mistake becomes your incident.
Start with the free plan
Nothing to cancel and no one to ring. If it does not suit you, take your export and go.
Three people, a thousand relationships, no card and no time limit.