Contact association in CommitCRM

[g2computersolutions]

I was just doing some data entry and wondered why it is that I enter contact information in an account record when I create it, but there is no contact stored under 'contacts' after the new account is created.

It would seem that the 'contacts' listed in the general account records should be a direct link into the contacts table. So, if I have ten people in my contacts listing, I could simply designate which one is the primary contact and that person would appear as the contact in the general listing.

The way it is currently, there are duplicate data entries related to 'contacts' which seems to be a basic no-no of data management.

Your thoughts?

[Support Team]

The primary Contact is built-into the Account record. You do not need to go and add the contact details once again. This saves a lot of time - for example, if you are serving consumer clients, most of the time all you have is their name (i.e. no company name) - with the current option all you need to do is add the account, set the client name in the account contact field and you're done. Separating the process into two parts - (1) adding an Account and (2) adding a primary contact - will make the entire process much slower. Also, in this case you'll need to 'invent' a name for the account - which will have the same name as the contact name what will result in duplicates in the accounts/contacts list.
Also, when searching for contacts in the account list - for example a search for "John" - the system automatically lists all primary contacts and secondary contacts with the name "John" in the same list, secondary contact are marked with an asterisk (*) symbol. This means that there's no need to add the primary contact as a secondary contact as well.

I hope this makes sense.

Neta

[g2computersolutions]

Actually, the way I'm thinking, the contact you put in when creating the account would automatically be the "primary" contact in the contacts list.

[Support Team]

Good point. However, what would be the Account name in this case? especially when working with consumers clients - the account name will be identical to the contact name and therefore when searching the account list you'll see two lines - one for the account and the other for the contact - both with the same name. We can think of filtering the list to show only accounts or only contacts etc. however, this completely changes the way the system works. In any case I'll make sure this suggestion will be reviewed. Thanks!

Neta