Choosing the ‘Enter contacts’ menu Item will take you first to a window asking for a contact name and town, postcode and optionally a company name:
Alternatively, Enterprise 6 users can click the [Enter contacts] button (on the Functions Palette) to launch this function.
If you are entering a member of a company (as opposed to a private individual), type in its name and town. If you are entering an individual’s private address, put in the person’s name, and click on the ‘Private Individual’ radio button below. If you only type a contact name (leaving the company fields blank), Enterprise 6 will assume you are entering a private individual. If you have set up a Default Role on the Core Functions screen of Preferences, any contact entered by means of this window will be assumed to be of that Role. When you press [OK], the system checks that you are not duplicating previous entries.
The operation of this window is controlled by a Preference in the Core Section, ‘Enter contacts Dedup uses company details’. If this is switched on, any details entered to this dialogue box concerning the company (ie name, Town and/or Postcode) will be used during the deduplication search. Therefore, when you enter, as an example, ‘Joe Bloggs who works at BP, London’ where ‘Joeline Bloggs who works at BP, Liverpool’ already exists in the database, you will no longer be presented with ‘Joeline’ as a possible duplicate. You would only be warned if ‘Joeline’ worked in London. If the Preference is switched off, the duplication check would only consider the name of the contact. The Preference is therefore very useful for avoiding the irritation of frequently being warned of possible duplicates that are never likely to be anything to do with the one being entered, but gives less secure deduplication if ‘Joe’ works in both London and Liverpool.
As a user of Enterprise 6, it is likely you will fall into one of two groups. contact-centric users will tend to use the ‘Enter contacts’ and ‘View contacts’ functions, virtually ignoring ‘Enter companies’ and ‘View companies’. Company-centric users will behave in the opposite fashion. It is likely that contact-centric users will not turn this Preference on, whilst company- or address-centric users will use it. This does not mean that the latter won’t deal with private individuals at their home addresses - the opposite may well be the case. company-centric users don’t mind if contact records are duplicated - they are essentially merely further bits of information attached to an address. contact-centric users, meanwhile, will make good use of the Multi-Company contact option because they need to ensure that a contact that is recorded as having done one thing at one address (eg in the diary) is the same contact (ie their codes are the same) recorded as having done something else at another address (eg in the bookings file).
Whatever the setting of this Preference, it is important to enter company details into the contacts preliminary window: when the entry screen of a new contact is brought up some company details will already have been filled in by Enterprise 6 using this information. If a company name/Town/Postcode was found that matches the combination you entered, then the company code of that company will be filled in and the rest of the address will be displayed. If more than one was found, it does the same, filling in the details of the first record found, which can be changed. This offers a good incentive for you to enter the Postcode, which is the best deduplicator. You could also enter the company code if you know it in the company name field, which is equally good as a deduplicator.
If no company was found that matches the company name/Town/Postcode, one is created. The record created uses the same settings as those for creating a company from ‘Enter companies’: it takes the company code from the company name if set to ‘Company’ or from the contact Surname if set to ‘Private individual’; it adds the Town and Postcode, and works out Mailsort data (if that companion volume is present); and it adds the company’s Status default.
That company records are created in this way is important, because it means that you can use the ‘Enter contacts’ option very effectively as an alternative to ‘Enter companies’. Both company and contact deduplication are done at the same time. The ‘View’ menu option to view the ‘Company’ can be used to bring up the company record for completing the address and other editing.
If possible duplicate contacts are found, these are listed. You can either modify an existing record (by double-clicking on the relevant line) or, if the contact you are trying to enter is not listed, click the [+] button in the Buttons Palette to create a new record. In the latter case, or if no possible duplicate matches were found, a screen comes up for the entry of other contact details:
Companies…
This is an Included List, so by clicking [+], you can link this contact to more than one company. For example, one of the contacts known to your company is self-employed and works for several organisations. Beneath the word No. in the top-right corner of the screen is a number - this is the number of companies associated with this contact.
Once a company code is entered, the name, address, Area, Telephone and Fax no will all be displayed on the contact Screen.
Address type
This field is an extension of the company type concept. You will need to create some new types such as ‘HOME’, ‘WORK’, ‘TEMP’ etc, and these are entered using the ‘Types’ function on the Core menu in the Data Manager.
†When setting up these types, you can determine whether the Job Title and Department of the contact in question will be included as part of the address in letters. This may be appropriate, for example, for addresses of the ‘WORK’ type, but perhaps not for those of the ‘HOME’ type.
The wildcard can be used to access the list of existing types in the usual way.
Contact code
There has to be a unique reference to refer to specific contacts (Name is not sufficiently unique). The system will automatically enter a number for you. If you want to use the contact code for other purposes you may overwrite this code, though the system will not allow duplications of a code.
Title
Immediately on moving to this field a list of alternatives for the contact Title (Mr, Mrs etc) will be displayed on the right of the screen, if you have this setting switched on in Preferences in the Data Manager. Choose from this list using the mouse or arrow keys & Return, or opt to type it yourself by first pressing Cancel. Up to 15 characters are allowed, which is more than would usually be necessary, but required in order to cope with Right Hon, Lt Col etc. The choices list can be switched off using the Core Functions section of Preferences in the Data Manager.
Esquire
Switch this on if, on Documents and Forms, you would like this contact to be addressed as, for example, 'D Holden Esq' instead of 'Mr D Holden'. When mailing this will operate whether or not the Mr as Esq check box is turned on in the Print Requirements dialogue box.
Forename
Remember to enter the Forename(s) and Surname separately, and do not leave trailing spaces at the end of an entry. The system will automatically capitalise the first letter of each word.
Surname
As Forename.
Qualifications
Enter any qualifications, such as BA, MSc, that you would like to appear on letters to the contact.
Salutation
On a letter, the contact will normally and automatically be addressed for example ‘Dear Mr Bloggs’. If you type anything into this box, it will always replace this standard. Most often this would be the same as the Forename, but it could be a nickname etc for personal contacts.
There is a Preference (set in the Data Manager) which, if switched on, will place the Forename in the Salutation field by default. This facility has a certain amount of intelligence in that it will only transfer words and will ignore initials.
Job Title
Enter the person’s Job Title, such as Managing Director, purchasing Manager, only if you want it to appear on letters. Do not use the field for free-form comments!
†You can control whether the Job Title is printed in addresses. This can be done at an overall level using the ‘Don’t Show Job Titles in addresses’ setting on the Core Data page of Preferences, or at a specific level for individual address types using the ‘Types’ function on the Core menu in the Data Manager.
Role
This small two character field can be used to refer to the ‘Role’ of an individual within a company, as distinct from his/her Job Title, and in a way that is useful to your business. Most simply, it can be used by typing “P” to identify the one individual within an organisation who is your Principal contact. It could equally be used to identify D - Decision Makers, or U - User etc. The wildcard can be used to bring up a list of Roles created in the Data Manager.
A default Role can be set up in Preferences in the Data Manager.
Dept/Room
If anything is entered to this line, it can be inserted into the address whenever a letter is printed to this individual, depending on how the address type has been set up using the ‘Types’ function on the Core menu in the Data Manager. If it is printed, it will appear after the name and Job Title, and before the company name.
Sales person
Identify here a Sales person responsible for dealing with this contact. When creating new contacts from within the company screen, this field will default to the Sales person for the company. When creating contacts using the ‘Enter contacts’ function, this field will default to the initials of the current user.
Taken by
This field defaults to the initials of the current user. It can be used to record who originally entered the contact to Enterprise 6. As with the Sales person field, the @ sign can be used to bring up an options list showing members of personnel.
Status
This code is used to represent the relationship of the contact on screen to your company. Examples might be C - Client, S - Supplier etc. Remember that all addresses are typed into the same file, so it is very important that you categorise them in some way. Typing the Status code in part, or just entering the @ will display a list, from which you can select with the mouse. If, on the other hand you enter a code that does not exist, you may be given the option of creating it, depending on the privileges allocated to you in your personnel record.
Each Status record contains a check box ‘Prevent Users from changing this Status once allocated & saved’. If this is switched on for the Status of the contact on screen, you will not be able to alter it. The Sales section of Preferences contains two settings: ‘Contact Status on Enquiry’ and ‘Contact Status on Order’. When an Enquiry or Order is entered, the Status of the contact concerned will be altered automatically to these settings.
Extension
For individual’s telephone extension numbers at work, or equally their home numbers.
Mobile
An additional field to enter the individual’s Mobile ‘phone number.
Fax
Use this field if this individual has a fax number differing from that shown on the company screen.
VOIP
Use this field to record a number for Voice Over IP.
Payment cards button
Hitting this button brings up a new window in which you can enter or view details of credit and debit cards of which you currently hold the details.
The fields shown are
- Type
- Issued by
- Card number
- Expires
Hitting the New Card button takes you to another window in which you add details for another card.
These details can then be accessed when using the Sales Order Processing module, if you have the Credit Card Processing subvolume installed.
EMail address
Record here the EMail address of the contact, if appropriate. The field contains 51 characters.
Entry date
This field simply records the date this contact record was created. It can be used, for example, to mail recently created contacts.
Modified date
This field works in exactly the same way as that in the companies file, being updated whenever you modify another field value.
Duplicate state
This field records whether a check has been carried out to discover whether there are other contacts in the database that could be duplicates for the contact on screen.
The field will be blank if no duplicate check has been carried out. Such contacts can be found using the More Choices search by entering “=” in the duplicate state field.
Other codes that are used are ‘C’ for Checked (and found to have no duplicates) and ‘D’ for duplicate (ie a record to be deleted).
However, the field allows free entry of up to 3 characters in uppercase, so users may choose to identify particular groups of contact records, perhaps to be deduplicated at different times using different methods. For the reason given below it would be a good idea to prefix such codes with ‘U’.
There is a Preference in the Core Section ‘Prevent use of Unchecked contacts’, which, if turned on, means that whenever a contact is specified in another file (for example, diary, Orders, Invoices), Enterprise 6 will look at the ‘Duplicate state’ of that contact record, and not allow the entry if it has not been ‘Checked’. If the duplicate state field is blank or contains any code beginning with either D (Duplicate) or U (Unchecked), then it will not be allowed.
Note that this does not prevent the viewing and editing of the contact records themselves. Since all users will start off with all contacts having a blank duplicate state field, it would not be a good idea to immediately turn on this Preference. One could force the system to believe that all have been checked by using the [Global Update] button to apply the code ‘C’ to the field.
This field is updated by the Deduplicate contacts function on the Utilities menu in the Data Manager, available to Enterprise Users only. For full details of that function and how it uses this field, please refer to the System Admin chapter about the Data Manager.
Comments
A free text area for any comments about the individual (Data Protection Act allowing!). To obtain a larger version of this field, ensure your cursor is within it and use the ‘Expand text’ item on the Functions menu.
This field is used by the ‘Deduplicate contacts’ function on the Utilities menu in the Data Manager to record information about possible duplicates of this contact. For full details of that function and how it uses this field, please refer to the System Admin chapter about the Data Manager. More details can also be found later in this chapter in the description of the ‘Go to duplicate’ item on the Functions menu.
Further analyses…
This is an included list. Use it for noting information about this contact that you might later wish to search by. For example, your company takes its top twenty corporate clients for a day’s golf each year. You would enter ‘Golf’ here as the further analysis. (Being an included list, you can add a new analysis at any time).