Questions about Accounts (company records)
We use the accounts tab to keep track of all companies in our universe. This includes companies we do business with, companies who are clients, and companies we follow. It ends up being a lot of companies and I'm looking for ways to manage a little better so that it is easier to browse through the companies to find what I need.
A couple of questions came up today:
1) Companies that go out of business, or get bought, or cease to exist in someway...what is the best way to handle these so that we can keep the info for historical records (there might be valuable contacts and notes associated with the company), but mark them as inactive somehow so they don't appear in normal reports and other lists?
2) What is the best way to deal with parent companies? A client of ours might have multiple branches around the world, and we will have contacts at all of them. I'd like to be able to just show the parent company when browsing the company lists, and click on the company name and see all the contacts associated with the parent company no matter which branch they work at...but I also need a way to view the branch details for the individual employee in case I need to send them something, or am scheduling a call and want to know what time zone they are in. Is there a way to do this?
It seems using the parent company feature associates the child company with the parent, but I have to click in to each child to see who works there rather than having a single master list. If the parent and child share a common name, i.e. Tata Group, Tata Motors, etc... I can just search for Tata and find all things associated with it which works well. This doesn't work as well for companies that don't share a name, say with Daiichi-Sankyo owning Ranbaxy...a search for Daiichi will not bring up the Ranbaxy people.