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Legal basis for processing People & Organizations
Legal basis for processing People & Organizations

Document the lawful basis for processing personal data on your customers, vendors, staff, or contacts for GDPR compliance.

Matthew James Finkel avatar
Written by Matthew James Finkel
Updated over a week ago

Before handling personal information about your European Union (EU) customers, vendors, staff, or other business contacts, you should determine and record what your lawful basis for doing this is. 

Use the “Legal basis for processing data” drop-down in People & Organizations to document your lawful basis, helping to make sure that you’re in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

What types of legal basis are there?

There are six types in Current RMS by default:

  • Employee

  • Freely given consent

  • Legitimate interest - existing customer

  • Legitimate interest - prospect/lead

  • Performance of contract

  • Unknown

These are stored as a list of values that you can add to in System Setup > List of Values.

Default values

  • All organizations and contacts added to your Current RMS system before May 21st 2018 have had their type automatically to “Unknown”.

  • Organizations and contacts that you add have a default type of “Legitimate interest - prospect/lead”.

  • All users have their default type defaulted to “Employee”.

You can change the default for new organizations and contacts by editing the “Lawful Basis Type” list in System Setup > List of Values.

Add or edit a legal basis

When creating or editing an organization, contact, or user in Current RMS, select the correct option from the “Legal basis for processing data” drop-down.

You’ll also see the option when creating a new organization from an opportunity.

See changes to legal basis

Changes to the legal basis are logged in Recent Actions. Click Recent Actions under the Actions heading on the right of a contact, organization, or user page to see changes.

Changes will also appear in a user’s recent actions.

Document layouts and discussion templates

If you’d like to display the legal basis for processing data on a document layout or discussion template, use the lawful_basis_type_name  attribute. 

How you access this will depend on the document or template that you’re working on and whether you’d like to display information about an organization, contact, or user. Check out: Liquid objects

Not familiar with editing document layouts? Not a problem, we offer a document layout modification service. Start a conversation with our Customer Success team using the green help bubble and we’ll be happy to help ↘️

Common questions

Which type should I use?

We provide tools in Current RMS to help you with GDPR compliance, but we can’t advise on how you use this field within your business. See: GDPR and Current RMS

What are the different types?

The different types of lawful basis are outlined in Article 6 of the text of GDPR. You can read the text at EUGDPR.org

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a good summary which may help as a starting point. Remember the ICO is a UK authority, so check resources for your region if necessary.

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