Accounts vs. contacts

[bathi743]

What is difference between a Contact and Account. We are B2C company and we would like to ue SugarCRM to log, track cases from customers. We will not use other options in SugarCRM. In this scenario, should I use Account or Contact as customer. It seems the case management needs Account as mandatory field.

What is relation between contact and account?

[hrcs]

My understanding is that a contact represents a person in the company and an account represents the company itself. A contact can belong to an account which clearly represents an employee working for a company.

[kuske]

In the case of a B2C business a contact is the same as an account.
BUT SugarCRM does not show that constellation.

If you use the panle "Enter Business Card" you can enter an account and a contact at the same time.

If you do not want to use contacts and accounts in different modules, you can define 2 additional fields in account module for first_name and last_name of an account und you will not need contacts any more.

The problem ist, that you cannot convert leads to contacts with this. But perhaps you do not use the leads module too.

[andopes]

Hi, bathi743

You can also add a new field salutation (dropdown, same as contact) into Account and create a logic_hook before_save to define the full name as a concatenation of salutation, first_name and last_name.

Cheers

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André Lopes
Lâmpada Global Services
Rua Bela Cintra, 299 conjunto. 51
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e-mail: info@lampadacrm.com.br

[bathi743]

Thanks for the information.
Our customers have a unquie customer ID and have more than two memberships numbers with our company. A customer might call us with either customer number or membership#.

In this scenario what is the best possible options to create accounts. Should I create a seperate account for each membership# or
Should I create an account for each customer with unquie cust#? If so where do I store the membership# in the sytem?

[kuske]

That is exact the Account-Contact data model.
The Account has a customer number and each Contact has a membership number.

[longreach]

You might also like to review this thread:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showt...&highlight=B2C