Trash and restore
How soft-delete works: archiving deals, contacts, and companies, who is allowed to delete, and how to restore.
Deleting in Ikigai is a two-step safety design. The everyday action is Archive — a soft delete that hides the record but keeps all its data. Permanent deletion ("Delete forever") is a separate, restricted action.
Archiving
- Contacts — from the card menu (the "Archive contact?" dialog) or in bulk from the list with Archive.
- Companies — same flow: the "Archive company?" dialog, or the bulk Archive action.
- Deals — archive from the deal or in bulk from the Table view of the pipeline.
An archived record disappears from lists, boards, and searches everywhere in the CRM — but nothing is lost: emails, notes, tasks, and history stay attached and come back intact on restore.
Where archived records live
For deals the trash is built into the board: switch the Active / Archive toggle to browse archived deals as a kanban. Each archived deal shows a banner like "Archived 12.06.2026". When the archive is empty, the board says so: "The archive is empty."
Contacts and companies have no self-service restore screen today: an archived contact or company disappears from the app, and bringing it back requires an administrator request (support / database restore). Keep that in mind before archiving them.
Restoring
On an archived deal press Restore — it acts immediately, with no confirmation dialog, and the deal returns to its pipeline and stage. You can also select several archived deals and restore them together — the confirmation asks only "Restore 5 deals?"; a toast reports "Restored: 5". Elsewhere in the app, links to an archived deal offer the same Restore action — for example the inbox notes: "The linked deal … is in the trash — restore it or attach another below."
Who can delete
| Action | Who |
|---|---|
| Archive (soft delete) | Requires delete permission on the record; without it you'll see "No permission to archive". |
| Delete forever (hard delete) | Requires the delete permission — by default only admins and workspace owners have it, but it can be granted to other roles. The delete item in the record menu is stricter: admins and owners only. |
Hard delete skips the trash entirely and is irreversible — the confirmation is explicit: "{count} contacts will be permanently removed along with their history. This cannot be undone." Every hard delete is written to the audit log before the data is removed.
Tip: default to Archive. It answers "we might need this later" for free — restore brings the record back exactly where it was, while "Delete forever" cannot be taken back.
Related: Contacts, Companies, Merging duplicates — merging is often the better cleanup than deleting.
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