Using CRM 4.0 within our office environment, we provide IT services to small businesses. Some of these customer Accounts, have multiple site locations across the UK, each with their own IT Inventory. At present these have to sit at the same level as the main Account and this can be confusing.
I understand there is a concept of sub-accounts, but these appear to be accounts with a relationship to a parent accounts, which initially seems right, but having played with this, when you ad a sub-account it still listed at the same level as all Accounts.
Ideally I'd like to add an additional layer / entity under Accounts, called Sites with the ability to record the contact person and address information etc as well as the Inventory at this location.
We already have an entity called Inventory available under the Account... how much work would it be to add this additional level and is this something that could easily be achieved by a confident novice to CRM like myself?
There are different things to filter for all users;
1. System Views (Costomization; Account ; Forms/Views) You can go into the xml file; and adjust the filters that is not possible to adjust from the view designer. Then set the views you feel like to default
2. Look-ups If you google for Filtered Lookups; you will find different approaches for this. Stunnware is one of the players, that has lots of insight on this.
If you wanting to filter out all 'sub-accounts' , you can modify your 'all accounts' or 'my accounts' view filter to only include accounts without a parent customer. (parent customer field is empty)
If you have established a 'customer role' or 'account type' field that identifies these accounts as a 'location' rather than a standard 'customer' you could filter on that as well.
Regardless, add this field to the lookup results views so when employees search for "ABC, ltd" they can quickly spot the one that isn't a 'child' or 'location' - Scott Sewell, CustomerEffective | http:\\blog.CustomerEffective.com | Twitter:@ScottSewell
I would not recommend that you establish a new entity. The reason is that you would need to replicate relationships, like for instance to contacts. Another reason is the "Parent" function from Outlook that looks up accounts. A third reason is that you get more modules ( ...my point is that I don't think it's a good idea).....
We have introduced a relationship type called "Parent Entity". This is a group entity that we use for typically global companies like Shell, ABB, AIG etc. The only purpose with accounts of this type is to group (cluster) accounts that belongs together. And we never do more then two levels, more levels then two are too much to maintain for the users (big companies change alot...)
A Parent entity shows only a limited number of fields and folders; i.e. we hide lots of information when relationshiptype eq. "Parent Entity"; typically the user is only left to enter the very basic information for the "Parent Entity", like name and relationship type.
We have also created some asp files (fetch XML method) to show aggregates of information from the underlaying companies, like "All Opportunities in structure" etc.
I have tried several solutions to the challange you describe(also the one you are describing), but I strongly reccomend the solution described here.....the users likes it.
Many thanks for the reply and your feedback... I think I've found a way to do this using the existing Sub-Account entity.
The issue was really having the sub-accounts show up under the main accounts lookup, so I've created a new Advanced Find that looks for Accounts with no Parent Account and a status of Active. Using this view it will only show the primary account and not the sub accounts.
My only question now is how to make this the default view for all my users.
There are different things to filter for all users;
1. System Views (Costomization; Account ; Forms/Views) You can go into the xml file; and adjust the filters that is not possible to adjust from the view designer. Then set the views you feel like to default
2. Look-ups If you google for Filtered Lookups; you will find different approaches for this. Stunnware is one of the players, that has lots of insight on this.
If you wanting to filter out all 'sub-accounts' , you can modify your 'all accounts' or 'my accounts' view filter to only include accounts without a parent customer. (parent customer field is empty)
If you have established a 'customer role' or 'account type' field that identifies these accounts as a 'location' rather than a standard 'customer' you could filter on that as well.
Regardless, add this field to the lookup results views so when employees search for "ABC, ltd" they can quickly spot the one that isn't a 'child' or 'location' - Scott Sewell, CustomerEffective | http:\\blog.CustomerEffective.com | Twitter:@ScottSewell
