Member Organization and/or Mapping Confusion

[jardenp]

I'm a new user and I'm having a problem I suspect experienced users could answer with ease. I hope.

I'm in sales and I'm using Sugar to keep track of customers and prospects. Since I spend most days making visits and calls, I sort my contacts by call zone/territories so that I can hit all the companies within a zone on the same trip. I need to know how to attach a zone label to each account, so that I can group/search by that label.

I've tried using a Member Organization, e.g. an account named "East Central" or "North Central," but I don't think I get the way the Member Organizations/Accounts relationship works. Do member organizations "belong" to accounts or do accounts "belong" to member organizations? Are "member organizations" just other accounts?

So, is there a user-defined labeling feature somewhere? Any suggestions for how I can approach this? I don't need to have the labeling automated based on the account's address. (Though this would be great, I don't expect Sugar to have the capabilities.) I have zones assigned to each account, and I just need a way to include these.

Many thanks to the Sugar community for all the help I've already received from the forums and wiki!

Ubuntu 8.04 - Heron
Apache 2.2.8
PHP 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.4 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli)
MySQL 5.0.51a-3ubuntu5.4
Sugar 5.2.0 Build 5380 Community Edition

[jardenp]

Update: I think I figured out the member organizations/accounts relationship.

So, I guess my question now is: is there a better way to label and sort accounts according to location zone than having dummy zone accounts, e.g. "East Central Accounts," and then assigning actual accounts to them in the "member of" field?

Thanks!

[roblaus]

Maybe a stupid question: But why you don't create a custom field "zone" (type dropdown) and add it to all views? That wil cost you 10 mins and you're all set?