Core Menu - Companies and contacts

Areas are used to classify the geographical location of Companies to any desired degree of precision.

The Areas used could thus be LON - London, SE - South East, or could be L1 to L5 - different areas of London. Don’t just replicate the postcode areas, because you already have a space for that information.

You may wish to categorise areas carefully according to a predefined plan for mailshot purposes, but this is optional, and the list could be built up gradually.Enterprise 6 is supplied with Areas based on the Royal Mail’s postal areas.When entering a company, you will be able to allocate an Area either manually (by entering one in the company’s Area field) or by entering a Postcode (if you have set these up using the menu item below).

Whichever method you use, if the Area chosen has a Default Person, that person will be used as a default for the company’s Sales Person field.

The Description field can be used for any purpose, but one example use would be to enter the name, address and other details of a local dealership, which can then effectively be automatically ‘allocated’ to Client Companies according to their Area, and perhaps printed on a Letter to those Clients.

The Tax Rate field is for use in US applications, where the Sales Tax may vary from State to State. UK Postcodes and ZIP codesOnce these are set up, together with the associated Areas, entering a Postcode into the Companies screen will cause the Area and any associated default Sales Person to be brought in automatically.

The importance of setting up Countries is that they are related to the Address Formats (see below).

Use this screen to allocate an Address Format to a particular Country. When you subsequently enter a company whose address includes a particular Country, any documentation printed by Enterprise 6 will contain an Address in the correct format for that Country.

If no Country is entered as part of an address, the default Address Format as set up in Preferences (see below) will be used.

Each Country has its own preferred Address Formats and these can be set up here.

After the Format Code and Name appear the field names. You can specify here the correct names for the fields as listed to the left.

For example, the English postcode has as its American equivalent ZIP Code, so that should be entered here. Wherever these fields appear in Enterprise 6 (for instance, in the ‘Enter Companies’ screen or the ‘View Companies’ dialogue box), the correct terminology will be used. Which is the correct terminology is determined by the Country of the User Address in Preferences (see below).

Enterprise 6 will pick up this Country, look in the Country file to find the associated Address Format (see above), and apply the correct terminology wherever appropriate.The next section of the screen is used to determine the order that the fields should appear in any documentation. As is shown in the documentation, the fields can be on separate lines, or separated by commas or spaces as appropriate.

Two final check boxes are Check Postcode Format (UK Style) and Enforce Postcode Format. These check boxes control whether postcodes entered on the Companies screen are checked for conformity with UK Post Office rules and, if so, how strongly the checking is enforced. Although designed mainly for use with the Mailsort companion volume, they do have a value as a weapon against incorrect typing when used independently. One rule, for example, is that Q, V and X are not allowed as the first character of a postcode. The only difference between the Checking and Enforcing options is that the latter will not give you the option to ‘Allow’ an incorrect format - but will always force you to ‘Try again’. Checking must be switched on for Enforcing to be enabled.

Note that foreign addresses will obviously not use the UK format. Therefore, if the UK Address Format is your default and you turn on checking, the checking will be applied to foreign addresses until you go to the Country field and specify a Country that has an alternative Address Format defined for it.

Note that the ‘Check Postcode format’ option described above must be turned on for Mailsort and QuickAddress users. If the default Address Format is not specified and you have purchased Mailsort, the checking option will be automatically activated.

Status is used to record your relationship with Companies or contacts, so examples might be PR - Prospect, CL - Client, or SP - Supplier.

It is important that you do enter some basic Status records such as those above when first using the system, though the list can be added to at any time. A check box provided to aid administration is ‘Prevent Users from changing this Status once allocated & saved’, and its operation is fairly self-explanatory.

The Usage… scrolling list contains the options ‘Companies’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Applicants’, ‘Attendees’ and ‘Diary’ because each of those screens has a Status field. The purpose of the Usage… scrolling list is to determine on which of those screens each Status can be used. When you create a new Status, Enterprise 6 will place a bullet (•) beside each item in the list, indicating that the Status can be used in all of those contexts. If you click on an option, for example, Attendees, the bullet will disappear, indicating that the Status cannot be used from the Attendee screen. When at the Attendee screen, if you type “@” in the Status field, the resulting selection list will show only those items that are allowed. If you enter a full Status Code that you know exists in the database, but is not applicable to Attendees, a message will inform you that ‘That Status does not exist, or is not applicable in this context. Do you want to create one?’. The bullet settings cannot be overridden from the Attendee volume. Therefore, if you select the option [Create It] (only offered if you have ‘Allow Data Manager Additions’ switched on in your Personnel record), then Enterprise 6 will always attempt to create a new Status. When the new Status record is brought up on screen in this situation, the Status Code field will be blank because otherwise you’d be trying to create a duplicate. Had you typed a non-existent Status Code on the Attendee screen, it would be placed in the Status Code field of the new Status record. In other words, if the Code appears blank when you’d expect it to be filled in, it will be because the Code you are looking for does exist but is not applicable in the context.

The code for storing Business Types is nine characters long rather than the usual four to allow for greater sophistication. The codes could reflect the Standard Industrial Classifications (SIC), or could be your own invented system, eg DCOMP - Distributor of Computers, SARCH - Architectural Service.

Business Types are the sort of list for which you are unlikely to be able to foresee all the requirements initially, and can be built up gradually through use of the system.

The Types file is used for several different purposes, and the Usage… scrolling list can be used to distinguish between these purposes. For example, it is used at a company level to describe the business Type of that company. It is also used at contact level: ‘Contact Cos’ refers to the Address Type field in the company included list on the contact screen. Each contact can have more than one address (you might have both their home and work numbers, or they might be a freelance worker with whom you have contact at more than one company) and here Type is used to describe each of their addresses (for example, Work Address and Home Address would be valid Types here).

The Usage… scrolling list operates in exactly the same manner as that on the Status screen: if the Type on screen is to be used as a business Type only, place a bullet beside ‘Company’, if it is an Address Type, place a bullet beside ‘Contact Cos’. Please refer to the Status section above for full instructions.

The Price group field can be used to allocate a special pricing rate to Companies of this Type. Please refer to the Price Matrix section of this manual for more details.

The final check box on the screen, ‘If this Address Type is allocated, omit Job Title/Dept from the Address’, is used to determine whether the Job Title and Department of a contact are included in the address when printing letters. It may be inappropriate to do this if using a home address, for example, so in such a case the check box should be switched on. The check box only has jurisdiction over Types with a bullet beside ‘Contact Cos’ (ie Address Types).

This refers to how you came by the company or contact you are typing in, eg AD - Advertising, PC - Personal contact, or CR - Client Referral. Again, it may make sense to build this list gradually.

The EnquiryWriter companion volume contains a report to show the success of the various Sources you are using.A Source can range from word of mouth through to a single specific advertisement. For word of mouth, most of the fields will obviously be left blank. However, in the case of an advertisement, there is space to record where it was placed, how much it cost, which member of Personnel was in charge and how many leads are expected to be generated.

If appropriate, the Product field can be used if the advertisement promoted a single product. If an Order is then entered with a File State with access to the ‘Copy Previous’ function and with this Source, an Order Item of this Product will be created automatically. All details, including cost and expected leads against actual leads, are shown in the report produced by the EnquiryWriter.

The Usage… scrolling list contains the options ‘Companies’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Attendees’ and ‘Orders’. This is fully described in the Status section above.

If your company advertises in The Times for instance, this fact should be set up here, so that when an Enquiry from that advertisement is entered, the fact can be recorded. The Publications file is also a look-up file used by the Sources file described above.

This file is used as a look-up by the Role field on the contacts screen. Store here possible Roles that a contact might have within their company.

A Role does not necessarily have to be the same as a Position, so it can be used to highlight contacts that are, for example, Decision Makers, Staff, or financial contacts.

This file is used for storing further information about contacts, Companies or Products that you might later want to search on eg analyses GOLF to indicate a golf player. Do not confuse this item with the nominal ledger analysis Codes.