Tables & field types — Name tables and fields so they read like English

Names are the one thing in a workspace that's hard to change later — every report, rollup, and AI prompt refers to your tables and fields by name, so a clean name keeps everything downstream clean. Four rules keep them honest: • Tables are plural nouns. Customers, Deals, Bookings — so one record reads naturally as "a Customer." • Fields are descriptive singular phrases. Just Email, not cust_email — the table already supplies the scope. • No abbreviations. Spell it out: Expected close, not Exp Cls. It saves more time than it costs. • Relation fields name the other side, not the action. The field on Deals that points at Companies is simply Company — not company_id or linked_company. The payoff is readability: "Sum of Amount across Deals where Stage is Closed Won" is a sentence you can trust; SUM(deal_amt) WHERE stg = 'CW' is a guess at meaning. Watch for names that signal a deeper problem — Status1 / Status2 usually wants two real names like Stage and Health, and a Misc or Other field is often a sign you need a new table or to split an existing one.