Favorite Act! Questions: What is a company record?
If you have been a long time user of Act!, perhaps even if not, it may not be clear to you what a “company record” is.
So here’s the skinny…. (and why it matters!)
Back in the “old days” of Act! – when Act! truly was pretty well summed up as a “contact manager” – version 6 and older that is – the contact was king. Everything that you did in Act! revolved around the contact record. All your notes, histories, activities and sales opportunities were child records belonging to a contact record.
If you had multiple contacts in your system from the same company, the only connection between them was that the Company name in the field at the top of the Act! screen was (presumably) the same. They did not share any data and there was no way to look at the histories of all those contacts in one place – you had to move through the contacts one record at a time to find what you might be looking for.
One workaround was to create a group named after the company and add the contact to that group. The potential problem with this was that if you also used groups for other purposes (event attendees, territories, etc.), now the purpose of your group data was somewhat ambiguous.
As a fix for this, when Sage converted Act! to the Microsoft SQL server platform with version 2005, they also created a new record type: Company.
So, if you are using Act! 2005 or newer, you have the capability to create company records in addition to contacts. They work pretty much the same way as creating a contact. They have their own detail screen and their own set of fields. You can create custom company fields and company detail screens just like you can for contacts.
Remember: They are independent of one another. (Yes, that is an over simplification for you power users out there, but for the sake of this conversation, it fits.)
Or you can choose to ignore company records altogether, be ‘retro’, and use Act! as if the calendar still read 2001.
Act! does not obligate you to use company records, and therein lies the confusion.
If you have never clicked the “Companies” button in the navigation bar, you probably think that a “company record” is that field at the top of the contact screen. Alas, it is not.
The company field that appears in the contact detail screen and on the Lookup menu is merely a field – or an attribute, a descriptor - of a contact. In the same fashion that you also have a phone number, cell number, and email field for a contact. They are all simply information about who and what the contact is/does: “John Doe works at ABC Company and I can call him at this number…”
Why might you start to use company records? After all, it means managing more data, some of which is redundant with what is alredy on the contact record(s).
Good question.
If most of your database contains contacts that are not company related – i.e. – consumers – or if you typically only have one contact per company, you probably don’t care about company records.
On the other hand, if you tend to typically have 2, 3, 5 or more contacts who all belong to the same company, then company records offer the following:
- Roll up views of histories and activities across all contacts in a company.
- Special company and opportunity reports that only work if you are using company records. (Opportunity by Company is one such example.)
- The chance to save keystrokes and avoid mistakes via company/contact linked fields.
- The ability to record company level data at the right place. (Think # employees, annual revenue, ticker symbol – you know this looks weird on a contact record… Because it is! That information is describing a company – not an individual.)
So, hopefully this little overview clarifies for you the difference and relationship between a company record and a contact record, along with a few of the things it can help you accomplish.
If you want more info, be sure to check out Act! Help.
Happy sales!
