Hold the Phone! A round up of articles that discuss Phone Numbers and Email addresses in Sage CRM

Hints, Tips and Tricks

Technical Hints Tips and Tricks that cover customization and development using Sage CRM. API usage and coding are covered.

Hold the Phone! A round up of articles that discuss Phone Numbers and Email addresses in Sage CRM

  • Comments 4
  • Likes

In Sage CRM development around phone numbers and email addresses needs careful thought. This is because Sage CRM "entities" can be complex. For example the information for a Company consists of a company record, a default person record and a default address. Both the company and the default contact will have phone numbers (and e-mail addresses) associated with them.

In Sage CRM company and person Phone and Email information is held in separate Phone and Email tables. The phone and email tables work in a similar way.

This data structure is flexible in design but it can be confusing. Below are some essential articles that may help you understand the way in which Phone and Email data is used in Sage CRM.

Comments
  • Thank you for these articles.  

    Tracking through this information can be confusing and in our case it can be even more confusing because we are working with leases and, therefore, the "company" record essentially is representative of the persons account.  The company record is holding the "account" information for the person.  Therefore, the address, phone and email address are all exactly the same for the company record and the person record.

    You look at the company summary record and you see the company name (which is the name of the individual); you see the address and phone/email (for the company...but really it is the person).  Then at the bottom of the screen, you see the "contact" information...which should be the same that you see above....but the phone and email on the Contact record are associated with the person record.

    If you need to update the address and phone/email data, you have to update the company record AND the person record.

    Anyway, I think you probably see why I am a little confused.  Lol.  But no worries.  I will read through the articles and make sure our database is on the right track!

    Again...Thank you for the articles!

  • Hi Michele,

    Just curious, why did you decide to use the companies as the main contact record for the people?  

    Did you not like the idea of using the "individual" option where the person is not related to a company in any way?  I would have thought this would be so much easier for the users to use the system and understand it as the entity names relate directly to the "entity" they are working with (eg: people so working with person, company so working with company).

    I am interested to hear what made you come to this decision with your companies (or customers) circumstances.

    Regards,

    Penny

  • Hi Penny..

    Sorry for the delay in response.  I missed seeing your comment.

    Your question is a difficult one for me to answer fully because I don't know ALL the reasons the system was originally setup in the manner that it was.  I would need to get the full details from our Partner who made the decision that this was the best setup for our needs.  

    However, in part , I believe that it had something to do with the way they (our Partner) had setup other systems for users that wanted to combine the use of Sage CRM with an external system called Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate (formerly called Sage Timberline).  Integration with Timberline is not something that comes "out of the box".  Therefore, they created custom modifications to make Sage CRM "talk" to Timberline.  I believe those modifications require the use of the company record.

    Another reason I believe that the company record is needed in our design is that each lease could possibly have a "guarantor" or second person associated with it.  Therefore, if you look at the company record and click on the people tab, you are most likely going to see two "people" listed there.  One is going to be the "resident" and one is going to be the "guarantor" for that resident.

    It is confusing.  However, it does appear to work with our system.  We just have to make sure that we understand how Sage CRM works in the backend to accommodate how we need to customize the system to "talk" to our external system.

    That is what I love about the system, we are not limited to "out of the box" functionality.  The system appears to be very flexible in allowing the development of the system to meet your needs.

    Hope this makes sense.  Also, my ears are always open to hearing....but you are not thinking about this and or this!  Therefore, I welcome any feedback.  Thanks! :-)

  • Hi Michele,

    I only just found your reply!  Sorry for not being more vigilant!!  I understand now - this is what I was thinking that it is integrated with software such as Timberline (Sage 300 CRE).

    Perhaps you could change the translations in the screens to reflect the way you work - eg: Company becomes Person Account or Person Record, or just Person Details in the screens for searching and displaying the information.  It can be a little tricky changing them all so you might like to test it out first on a test system.  The other suggestion I can think of here for you is to write a table level script that updates the person or updates the company table each time the phone or email are changed. I know Jeff has some great examples up here to look at and this should make your life easier and less confusing Michele.  

    Best regards,

    Penny