Company Contacts
Creating Additional Contacts for the Same Company
One of the easiest ways to do this is simply to duplicate an existing contact for that company: the link to the company will be preserved.
Also check out our comments about deleting contacts and how this affects contacts related to a company.
Here is how "Contacts and The Same Company" works: In our sample data the first record is for a company "Applewood center..." and you'll see a "contact at the same company" listed: Barbara Henn. If you create any new contact and mark this new record as a contact, not a company, when you click on the company name you'll be asked to select a company for this new contact: select "Applewood center..." and this new contact will show up as a "contact at the same company" on Barbara Henn's record.
If your new record is marked as a company, however, the you can type in a company name and you can create two companies with the same name (though you shouldn't), but those won't be "contacts at the same company".
How are Companies and Contacts Related?
Both companies and contacts are records within the same table. The are related based on a “self-join” between the record’ foreign key, “ContactCompanyID_kf” and the related record’s primary key, “ContactID_kprime”.
On the contact’s Overview tab you’ll see a checkbox called “this record is a…”. If “company” is checked here then:
This record may have a company name typed in its company field; and
This record will show up in the list of companies to which other contacts may be associated.
If “company” is not checked, then you may not type a name in the company field, but must select a company from the list of possible companies if you want to associate this contact with a company.
Note that you can set the default behavior of this “this record is a… company/contact” attribute on the Settings section of the Admin tab.
A couple tips.
If most of your contacts as small businesses or sole proprietors with whom you generally deal with just one person, you’ll probably want these record to have both company and contact checked. This way you can give the record a person’s first and last name (as your primary contact) and type in the name of their company. This gives you the convenience of just having one record for this entity and, should you need to record additional contacts for this company later, you already have the entity recorded as a company.
If you’re dealing with a lot of larger companies where you have tons of contacts at each place. You’ll likely want to create one company record for the institution. This record would have company checked but contact unchecked and would only have a company name, not a first and last name...
You’d then create separate records for each of your contacts at the company (these records would have “company” unchecked), selecting the company name as the company for each. One advantage of this is that you only have to record the company address and phone once and its available on each of the contacts’ records, along side their own address and phone information...
