▤Company file

It brings together everything about one company: staff, opportunities, notes, activity. Without it, you would have to look for the same information across five contacts.

You get there via the company name in the contact list — there is no separate menu item for it.

• Overview — master data and the essentials at a glance.
• Contact people — all contacts assigned to this company.
• Activity — what has happened with this company so far, across all contact people.

The numbers in the header tell you where there is something — so you can see without clicking whether there is any activity at all.

Directly in the company file, saved with Ctrl+Enter. Everyone in the team sees what is written here.

The difference from the note on a contact: the company note applies to the business and remains even if the contact person changes. That is exactly what it is for — “always pays only after a reminder” belongs on the company, “prefers calls in the morning” on the person.

Because the name has been spelt differently. A variant spelling of the company name creates a separate file — “Müller GmbH”, “Mueller GmbH” and “Müller G.m.b.H.” are three companies.

You can clean this up by setting the company name on the contacts concerned to the consistent spelling; the files then grow back together. Prevention is easier: agree on one spelling in the team before the first hundred contacts come in.

The company’s career pages. You enter them with “+ Add links”; several addresses are separated with a vertical bar.

The benefit is practical: if you regularly check what a company is advertising, you save yourself the searching — the address is where it is needed. The field is called “Links / portals”.

From the address fields of the associated contacts — street, postcode and town. They are also used for letters and for the location map in the reports.

If a company is missing from the map, its contacts are missing the postcode. That is the usual case after an import in which the address columns were not assigned.

By itself: as soon as a contact has a company name, the file exists. There is no “Create company” button and no separate menu item.

That also explains why a company without an assigned contact cannot be found — it simply does not exist. If you want to note a company for which you do not yet have a contact person, create a contact with the company name and add the person later.

Two ways, depending on how you work:

• One entry for the company, with the locations as a tag on the contacts. Right if you look after the business as a whole.
• Separate entries with distinguishable names — “Muster GmbH North”, “Muster GmbH South”. Right if the locations make decisions separately.

Decide this once in the team. Changing later is manual work on every single contact.

Everything that has happened with one of its contacts — mails, calls, notes, tasks. The tab brings it together across all contact people.

This is the view that matters before a meeting: it answers the question “what did we last have to do with them” without you having to remember which of us spoke to whom.

By setting the company name on the contacts concerned to one spelling. The files then grow together; there is no separate merge button, because the file is only a view of the contacts.

In practice: search for both spellings, select the contacts with the wrong variant and change the company name.

Change the category of the associated contacts — that controls who is written to in future — and record the reason in the company note.

Do not delete anything. The history of a customer relationship that has ended is exactly what you will be looking for in two years’ time, when someone new starts there and calls again.

Yes — everyone in the team sees what is written here.

That is intended and makes the note useful. But it also means: assessments of people, assumptions about payment habits and anything you would not say to a customer’s face do not belong in it. If in doubt, a note is part of a subject access request under the GDPR.

Via the company name — the same link as for contacts. In the file, you can therefore see which positions are or were open at this company.

Together with the stored job portals, this gives you the view that helps before a call: what are they looking for at the moment, and who do we deal with there?

When there is a reason, not on a schedule. The best moment is when you are dealing with the company anyway: after a phone call, after a reply, after a bounce.

Two triggers where it is always worthwhile:

• A hard bounce — the address no longer exists, often because the person has left.
• An out-of-office message naming a stand-in — it gives the new contact person, whom you would otherwise have to search for laboriously.