How people and organizations are linked

Contacts keeps one record for every person and every company the firm deals with, and every other app reads from it. This page explains how those records hang together, so that the cards, the groups of the list and the invoices of a client make sense.

Persons and companies

The Type at the top of a contact makes it a Person or a Company. Each record has at most one parent, shown in Belongs to, and any number of children, shown as cards in the Contacts section of the Optional Info tab. Two kinds of link use that same parent:

The first link is the classic one: a person works for a company. The company is then his commercial entity, so invoices addressed to him belong to the company's account. He shares its address: change the company's address and its people follow, change it on one of them and the company changes too.

Organizations filed under a person

The second link is the one this app adds: one person who owns or runs several organizations. Link Existing Organization writes two things on the organization: Belongs to becomes the person, and its address type becomes Organization, which also keeps it a company. Nothing else moves. The organization stays its own commercial entity, so its invoices and payments stay its own; it keeps its own address, its CR No and its chatter; its name shows alone in the lists. In the list, the filter Organizations with the grouping Parent gathers the organizations of each person.

The window exists because the two usual paths cannot do it. Belongs to offers companies only, so a person can never be picked as a parent there; and the Add Contact card only creates new contacts, so it cannot attach a company that already exists.

One parent, one type, one role

An organization has one parent at a time. Linking it to a second person moves it, which is why the window shows a warning naming the person it is filed under. Two people cannot share one organization through this link.

The Organization Type (Company, Government, NGO, Association, Foundation, Institution, Cooperative) and the Role of the person (Owner, Partner, Director, Manager, Accountant, Representative) are stored on the organization itself, one of each. The role describes the person the organization is filed under. They show as badges on the person's cards and in the window. In this version no form writes them: the window shows them without saving a change, and the Create Contact window of Add Contact has neither field. The lists of choices are kept in Organization types, contact roles and tags.

Registration numbers and uniqueness

CR No, the commercial registration number, is shown on companies only. It is free text, with no check of format and no check against the other contacts.

Phone numbers and e-mail addresses, on the other hand, are unique across the address book while the Contact uniqueness settings are on. Records of one family, a company with its people or a person with the organizations filed under him, may share them when duplicates within the same organization are allowed. These settings live in General Settings: the two modules of this app add no setting of their own, no scheduled action, no automation and no e-mail template.

Archiving, deleting and merging

A contact has no stages. It is active, archived or deleted. Archiving hides it from the lists and from the choices of every app until someone unarchives it. Deleting removes it; the Recycle bin explains what is kept of it. Merge duplicate contacts turns two or three records of one client into one and redirects their documents.

What the app does not do

• It does not file one organization under several people: the last link wins.
• It does not move invoices, payments or documents when an organization is filed under someone.
• It does not let you set the type or the role of an organization from a form in this version.
• It does not check the format or the uniqueness of CR No.

Who may do what

The access rights themselves are set on each user, as Create a user and set access rights shows.