Good afternoon,

I am a new user of Zoho One (still in trial period) and in the early stages of building our system. All of the videos I've watched on this subject advise on giving a lot of thought to your requirements before creating new layouts as they can be problematic and overcomplicated. In some instances I can absolutely see the need for a new layout, but with contacts, I can't workout whether to use fewer layouts with lots of rules, or fewer rules and more layouts!

We are a property management business and therefore we have two very separate areas of our business. We have new landlords enquiring and coming on board for us to manage their property and we have tenants applying to live in those properties. In the case of the deals module, it absolutely makes sense that we would have a landlord layout and a tenant layout for this.

In terms of contacts, we have the tenants, but we also have their guarantors (who are referenced much like the tenants). We the have landlords who can either own their investment properties in their personal name, or through a limited company where they may be multiple people involved. An extreme example would be Mr Landlord who owns one property in his own name and a local University that owns several properties and has multiple contacts in different departments. Then we have contractors who will carry out repairs on the properties, as well as local councils who we will need to contact for licences etc. 

I had initially though that we would have a layout for every type of contact, but realised we can only have 4 layouts per module. I then thought we could possibly group tenants and their guarantors together, using layout rules to hide non-relevant information for each.

This led me to question what the difference is between using layouts and layout rules? does one have more limitations down the line? It's difficult to think ahead as I'm not sure what obstacles we may face as the system develops.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Thanks

Rich