Help me about Accounts and Contacts

[tinhthong12sg]

I use SugarCRM for our company to manage our customers.
Our customers can be a persion or a company with many contacts.
If the customer is a company, I create a Account for the company, and create Contacts for this company.
If the customer is a persion, I create a Contacts for him/her. But I don't know to need to create a Account for him/her.
If this persion haven't a Account, some function can not apply for him/her.
Please help me.
Thank you!
V.Truong

[roblaus]

No, unlike other CRM products Sugar will let you create contacts without accounts. This is fine and won't cost you any functionality.

[enrashid]

Because some of your Customers are also individual people, it is still CRM best practice to create an account regardless of whether you are dealing with organizations (company) or an individual as customers. There is nothing wrong with an Account being a individual. For example, we have Customers that are individual doctors. There office can one day hire more people and we may want to track them as Contacts under that one Account (including the Doctor him/herself). The Account name could be Lastname, Firstname for example.

YES, there is some redundancy, for example, when you enter the address information, but there are more advantages than disadvantages.

Why create an account?

Q: Ok, let me ask you how many customers you have? You would have to search under Accounts and Contacts for this info.

Q: How would you distiguish between Contacts (that are not individual customers) that are part of a Company Account and Contacts that are individual customers that are not part of any Account? If you wanted to target specific types of customers you would need to access both Accounts and Contacts.

Q: What if an individual customer Contact leaves? You would have to have a status field both at the Account and Contact level saying these are customers and they they are Active or Cancelled or ...

Q: How would you organizing the selling of your products and services by way of Opportunities and Quotes? Optys are tied back to an Account (required field)

Recommondation - Create all Customers and Prospects as Accounts, but create a field if you wish in Accounts that distiguishes between a Company from an Individual. Use the status field or customize one to show if a Customer/Account is Active or Cancelled.

I use SugarCRM for our company to manage our customers.
Our customers can be a persion or a company with many contacts.
If the customer is a company, I create a Account for the company, and create Contacts for this company.
If the customer is a persion, I create a Contacts for him/her. But I don't know to need to create a Account for him/her.
If this persion haven't a Account, some function can not apply for him/her.
Please help me.
Thank you!
V.Truong

[roblaus]

I've seen both solutions and a third one (having one dummy account and attach all accountless contacts to it). All have their advantages and disadvantages.
For entities dealing primarily with idividuals (e.g. web shops) it is good practice not to enter a contact as account and contact. If it is the other way round it may be worthwhile to do it this way.
In the standard CE/Express edition Sugar cannot query any contacts based on account criteria anyway.