Records for Companies can be entered and tracked in more than one way in AdvisorEngine CRM. See the options below to determine which will best suit your firm’s requirements for tracking and reporting.
- Single Company Record: Create one Record for the company that includes contact information for all the employees you communicate with. This allows you to only track Actions and information at the Company level. You will be unable to search for or report on the employees individually, only the Company as a whole.
- Company Record and Employee Records: Create one Record for the Company and Records for each employee, joined through Relationships. This allows you to track information for and report on individual employees as well as the entire Company. Though more comprehensive, this approach requires more effort in setup and maintenance.
Which option you use for a Company should be determined by which data you want to get from the system later. For example, when tracking referral sources, ask yourself if you would rather track a referral source at the company level or track the person that the referral came from.
This best practice can also be used for other types of entity Records in the system including, but not limited to, 401k plans, Trusts, or other 3rd party vendors.
Either Method
Whichever approach you choose, both require the same basic setup. Follow the steps under this heading and then choose how to continue below.
- Begin creating a new Record.
- Set the Record Name as the company name.
- Set the Office, Owner Group, and Editor Group according to your firm’s practices.
- Set appropriate Classifications and Tags for the company.
- Enter the primary phone, email, and mailing address for the company.
- Add a Person to the Record.
- Set the Relationship to Record to Company.
- Set Last Name to the company name.
- Set First Name to a single character of your choice (underscore, hyphen, apostrophe), as it cannot be left blank.
Single Company Record
If you prefer to track contact information, communications, and notes for all contacts within a company in one Record, we recommend the following:
- Add contact information for company employees or departments to Person 1.
- Use the Label field to identify which person/department the contact information belongs to.
Note: Using this method does not allow you to search for or report on a person that is listed in the Label. You will be able to search for and report on the company only and check the contact info manually.
Company Record and Employee Records
If you prefer to search for, communicate with, track referrals from, or report on each person within the company individually (ex. all partners within a CPA firm) we recommend the following:
- After creating the company Record above, create a separate Record for each person within the company.
- Add Primary contact information to the Record details for each new Record (phone, email, mailing address).
- Create a relationship between the Company Record and any individual employee Records at the firm.