Companies and profiles

Every company on Clover has a profile — a structured description of who the company is. It's worth understanding early, because it's the data that connections unlock and that many tasks draw from.

A profile is layered

Not all of a profile is equally visible:

Public information is visible to anyone on Clover — your name, website, and other identifying details. It's how companies find and recognize each other before any relationship exists.
Private information stays hidden until you've connected with a partner, and even then you control how much you share with that specific partner.

This layering is the point: a company can be discoverable on the network without exposing private details to everyone. The connection is the key that unlocks the deeper layer, one trading relationship at a time.

Standard fields and custom fields

Some profile fields are standard — the same for every company, defined by Clover (identity, description, and the like). Others are custom — fields your organization adds to capture data that matters to your business but isn't part of the standard set. Custom fields let the profile model your world, not just a generic company record.

A custom field is the simplest form of a bigger idea. When the data you need to represent is larger and more structured than a single field — a purchase order, a product, a chargeback — Clover handles it as a business process object. Custom fields and business process objects are the same fundamental capability at different complexity: defining data in a fixed shape and working with instances of it.

Fields you keep about your partners

Beyond your own profile, Clover lets a company keep shared custom fields about the partners it works with — information attached to a specific trading partner rather than to your own company. This is how a buying organization tracks partner-specific details (an internal vendor ID, a category, a status) right alongside the connection. The "shared custom fields" you see today are exactly these partner-attached fields.

Field types

Profile fields come in defined types — text, numbers, dates, single- and multi-select lists, images, contacts, and locations among them — so the data stays structured and usable in tasks and reporting rather than free-form. (A reference listing every field type will accompany these concepts.)

Why it matters

Because the profile is structured and layered, the rest of Clover can rely on it: tasks pre-fill from it, partners see exactly the slice you intend, and reporting can summarize across it. Keeping your profile complete and current is one of the highest-leverage things a company can do on the platform.

Connections and the network — what unlocks the private layer
Business process objects — the complex end of the same idea
How Clover works — the bigger picture