Duplicate data

[ac1982]

Hi,

I am a newbie in SugarCrm and I am a bit confused about the difference between Contacts and Leads? A Lead is consider to be a potential customer where a Contact is a customer? When you create a Lead in the near feature that lead will become a Contact if a sale happens, which means I will create this Lead again with the same data in Contacts as well? Am I right? If not please correct me. So a person will exists in 2 different places.

[sugarcane]

Hello,

there is a Convert Lead button which will allow you to convert a lead into a contact, and also the option to create a new account, opportunity, and activity all within the convert screen.

All fields that exist both in the Leads module and the Contacts module will be copied from the Lead to the contact, and any activity items at the time of conversion will also be copied to the contact.

You are correct that the lead and the contact exit together in the system. You can see a link to the lead from the contact (in the leads subpanel), which lets you know that the lead converted. there is also a link to the converted contact from the lead.. The lead status automatically changes to a status of 'converted' when you convert a lead, so you can easily filter out your leads by this status in the search panel. They continue to exist for historical purposes.

Some people do not like this separation, we have had clients only use contacts and accounts and use a type field to denote whether they are leads or contacts. I have seen other people on this forum create a custom script to auto delete any 'converted' leads. Then again, many people do not mind having a person as both a lead and contact.

[ac1982]

Thank you, so I was right about this duplication. I believe that the script for deleting converted leads would be useful to reduce this mixed up.