Very noob question! What do these terms meam?

[donty]

I am testing to see if SugarCRM will help us better collate our sales and customer data. However I am stumbling on some basic knowledge of the terms used here.

There are plenty of references to Accounts, Users, Lead, Target and Contacts but I can't tell where some are used interchangeably and what distinctions the system makes between them.

I 'think' they work as follows:

Accounts - Legal entities of customers of products/services being sold to
Users - users of the SugarCRM system itself
Lead - prospective customer
Target - prospective lead?
Contact - personal contact at a customer ie Account.

Does that mean that all leads and targets are just status changes to a contact? Are all Accounts also targets and leads either with or without contacts? Can you have a contact not attached to an account?

I want to be able to import some Yell data we have bought into SugarCRM and I do have some problems with what appears to be a single import screen for accounts and contacts and the desire to have the account name as the company name. As we have several contacts for each company it seems to cause import problems and drop the account name from all the contacts!

Help is gratefully accepted ;-)

[shailendra001]

Does that mean that all leads and targets are just status changes to a contact? Are all Accounts also targets and leads either with or without contacts? Can you have a contact not attached to an account?

1)Yes
2)No
3)Yes

I want to be able to import some Yell data we have bought into SugarCRM and I do have some problems with what appears to be a single import screen for accounts and contacts and the desire to have the account name as the company name. As we have several contacts for each company it seems to cause import problems and drop the account name from all the contacts!

What is your source file type , from where you are trying to import contact records ??
If it is CSV file you can add one more column called ' Account name ' in csv file that contains contact records , and if there is more then one contact for an Account , repeatedly enter the same account name into 'Account name' column for those contacts . then try to import with proper mapping , relation of account and contact will work



Regards
Shailendra

[donty]

That's great, thanks. I have a csv file with valid data and the imports worked in themselves but I was missing that structural concept piece of the puzzle to see what I needed to do.

I realised that there are two import processes needed, one for accounts then one for contacts under the relevant menu options for Accounts and Contacts. In case it helps anyone else what I did was the following

Import with update for the Accounts using our data provider's unique Company_URN field to populate the Account_id and assigned the various other data fields as needed for the company information. This meant I would not get duplicates, simply an update to the account record each time it found an entry for it in the data.

Then I used the same data set to import the contacts with import and update setting. I set the account id the same as before so the right account could be identified and then set Contact_id using the unique Contact_URN from the data provider to stop duplicate problems with the contact data. Similarly all the other fields eg telephone, address etc were matched up for the contact.

All flew through fine and I now have all the companies/accounts setup and all the contacts for each of those companies.

Many thanks for the clarification, it is much appreciated.

K

[clint]

I suggest the Getting Started sections of the Sugar University.

http://www.sugarcrm.com/university/library.php

This will help you understand the Sugar system in detail.

Clint

[donty]

Thanks, I will.

I admit I do tend to leap in and see how far the product design gets me before hitting the walls. Then how good the forums are on existing questions and then how active/helpful the forums are.

SugarCRM has done well on all those so far.

I will now RTFM ;-)