I have several implementations for CRM where we need to have a Contact related to more than one Account – for the most part we have the needs met by removing the default ONE TO MANY and creating MANY to MANY - however it presents an issue with the Contacts showing in List View as duplicates - where it is only ONE contact with multiple Account related to it.
example - we have a contact that works at more than one Account.
how do others handle this requirement?
I think that the standard relationship between Accounts and Contacts is already a Many-to-Many
In fact you can try adding a contact to other accounts from the contacts subpanel of each account where you want the contact.
The last account you use to add the contact will be shown in the contacts view. However each of the accounts whee you added the contact will continue having the account.
you may then use a report to see to which accounts a contact is related. Otherwise, you will have to write some custom code to show the accounts subpanel under contacts.
Have a look here too:
https://support.sugarcrm.com/Knowledge_Base/Accounts_Contacts_Leads/Understanding_the_Accounts-Contacts_Relationship/index.html
I am experiencing this issue – where a Contact with more than ONE related Account will have a record show in LIST VIEW (POPUP SEARCH LIST VIEW) for each related Account – if a Contact has 8 related Accounts - they will show 8 times in List view for contacts - even though there is only ONE contact.
For one of our clients we have avoided this issue by creating a new many-to-many relationship and we used the standard relationship for main assignments.
I remember that the same issue that you are experiencing (multiple entries of the same contact in list view) was tackled more than one year ago in the forum so, if you search, you may find their experience and possibly a solution.
(When you search the forum, make sure that you search all posts from the beginning)