Is this possible: Multiple Accounts w/only 1 contact?

[slsl]

Hey Everyone,

OK, haven't stumbled across this in oh forever, but one of my field personnel asked me the following question -

He has 3 separate accounts (companies).  They are all owned by the same person.   Instead of putting that person in as a primary contact at each account, can that individual only be inserted onto 1 of the companies and be referenced by all three?  I'm toying around with the idea of Associations, but not 100% sold on that solution.  Has anyone ever encountered this particular issue before, and if so, have it successfully addressed?

Thanks!

Joe

[MikeSpragg]

When you say referenced, what do you mean?

Certainly an account can have multiple contacts - each managed by a different user (accountmanagerid) - but not (really) owned by 3 different people (you can alter this though using the seccodeid).

But, it sounds like you mean an account has a "shadow" contact for all three accounts, pointing at just one physical company. That isn't possible right now - except via associations (but that then breaks activities etc).

[slsl]

OK, let me clear up the scenario.

Company A is owned and operated by Bob Jones in New Mexica

Comapny B is owned and operated by Bob Jones in Arizona

Company C is owned and operated by Bob Jones in Utah

Field rep is OK with entering 3 seperate Accounts as they are in 3 seperate physical locations.  However, since Bob Jones owns all 3, just wants to have Bob entered once (cuts down on multiple e-mails, etc...).  And I see where it "breaks" now on activities too.  Didn't quite think of that....

[MikeSpragg]

Right, yes, see what you mean now - but, no - nothing in there for that I'm afraid.

Mike

[DanCarvin]

I would address this as follows...  If two of Bob's companies are subsidiaries of the the third, I would put Bob's contact record at that company and set that company in the Parent field of the other two.

If there is no heirarchal relationship, I would pick the company Bob spends most of his time at, put his contact record there and define the relationship to the other two companies on the Associations tab.

[RJSamp]

The quick answer is no.......simply enter the three contacts (with potentially different phones, emails, address, spouses......) and then associate the accounts, parent the accounts etc.

If you want to do some heavy heavy customizing......you can build a table, call it WorksFor, and point the contact to this table which has a link to the other Account (one WorksFor record per Account)......even then you still have broken the Activity, History/Notes model/schema......

I would think the saleman would want to know specifically what they talked about.....including which of the three companies was at task......

[scankannan]

even from a sales rep's perspective bob although owning 3 companies, they are located in different locations, and all contact communications such as fax,telephone(except mobile) would be specific to the address where he is spending time at that point in time. So its always better that it is captured as a seperate contact. Another idea that comes to my mind is have a function called copy contact and make the user point to a particular account where he wishes to add this and there by modify only those fields which are unique to that account.

 this exists as a feature in act, that you might want to implement, where you duplicate the contact, while duplicating it copy data from primary fields of interest and the rest could be very local to that particular account.