# Notes

Source: https://docs.havilo.ai/concepts/notes

Notes hold the written knowledge around a network: research, observations, meeting context, decisions, transcripts, and explanations that do not fit cleanly in fields.

A note has its own identity. The same document can be linked to several entities or reference other notes without copying its text. A meeting note about four people can appear on all four entity pages; editing it from any one of them updates the same note.

## Note roles

Havilo uses Notes for several kinds of document. Their role determines where they appear and how they are maintained.

| Role                  | Purpose                                                                                         |
| --------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Primary note**      | The main narrative on an entity, such as a biography, company summary, or investment thesis.    |
| **Dossier**           | A briefing Havilo maintains for an entity as the underlying knowledge changes.                  |
| **Supplemental note** | Research, imported material, meeting notes, and other context linked to one or more entities.   |
| **Meeting document**  | A transcript or briefing linked to its calendar event and, where appropriate, its participants. |
| **Field memo**        | A quick personal capture from Wexler.                                                           |

Each of these is one door on an entity page. **Team Notes** opens the primary note — the one your workspace writes and edits together — **Dossier** opens the dossier, **Meetings** holds a meeting's documents alongside the meeting itself, and every supplemental note gets its own row under **Sources**, named by where it came from — Crunchbase, LinkedIn, a website, or its own title when a person wrote it. Nothing is filed inside a list you have to open first.

## Connections

A note can connect to:

* one or more entities;
* another note;
* a calendar event;
* a folder; or
* a saved document artifact.

These connections let one document participate in several kinds of work. A transcript can remain attached to its meeting, a research memo can appear on every company it covers, and a later synthesis can reference the notes it used.

## Editing and collaboration

Notes use Havilo's shared document editor. They support headings, lists, tables, images, entity mentions, and references to other notes. Several workspace members can edit the same note at the same time, with live presence and cursors.

The editor stays consistent wherever a Note appears. Opening a transcript from Calendar and opening the same Note from another workspace surface leads to the same document and collaborative room.

Some Notes are read-only because another system writes them. Dossiers, enrichment documents, imported Data Bridge documents, notes generated from a calendar event, and template-controlled notes are all rewritten in full by whatever produced them, so a hand edit would be erased on the next run rather than refused. They read the same wherever they are opened — from a record, from Notes, or from a link Havilo writes into a conversation — and carry a **View Only** mark. Change what the Note is written from instead: the record, the source data, or the event.

Meeting transcripts are yours to edit.

## Search and reasoning

Havilo continuously indexes Notes and uses their contents alongside entities, relationships, meetings, and other workspace context. A detail captured in prose can inform a later search, match, briefing, or draft without first being converted into a field.

Primary notes describe who or what an entity is. Dossiers capture maintained knowledge. Supplemental notes add the observations and experience that structured fields often miss.

For example, writing that Ellie took a medical device through FDA approval gives Havilo evidence for a later question about people with FDA experience, even when the entity has no dedicated field for it.

As Notes change, Havilo updates the context available to later work. Meeting transcripts, research, and firsthand observations can therefore compound rather than disappear into isolated documents.

## Notes and artifacts

Notes and document artifacts use the same document presentation, but they are different objects.

| Object                | What it represents                                                                                              |
| --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Note**              | Editable written knowledge in the workspace, with links to entities, notes, meetings, folders, and source data. |
| **Document artifact** | A read-only generated result that can be saved, shared, and linked to entities.                                 |

Saving a generated document artifact does not automatically create or change a Note. Use a Note when the material should become editable, collaborative workspace knowledge; use an artifact when the generated result itself should remain intact. See [Artifacts](https://docs.havilo.ai/concepts/artifacts.md).