I am a lawyer and my customers are generally people not companies. Since customers can sometimes be companies, however, I have to use the Accounts module for all my clients.
If I have a customer named John Smith who is just a person, not a company, I currently add them as a contact and account. For their entry in the accounts module, I just concatenate their name, ie “John Smith”
This seems kludgy. If I ever needed to change John’s name, I would need to do so in both the accounts module and the contacts module.
I tried searching various forums for best practices when confronting this scenario but haven’t found anything useful.
My current thought is to modify the Accounts module and change the field name of “Name” to “Customer Number” and then add another field of “Company Name” which will not be required.
I am curious if anyone has better suggestions though
Wouldn’t it be best if you assign a case number as account and add him as a contact?
This way you can correctly correspond when he will send letters (and if you have tons of clients ofcourse) You will not mix up multiple john smith entries.
Thank you for the idea.The reason I didn’t do that is because sometimes (very rarely) I do have a client who is a company and I’m hesitant to make a circular relationship of account->account
For cases, I’m making a custom module which will have a case number field and can have multiple accounts related to it. Maybe an account for the plaintiff, one for the defendant, one for the opposing attorney, one for the judge, etc.
I think you can create a dropdown field name type of Account in the Account module with the options “Contact” and “Account”. The name field you can use for the person name or company name in that case.
We often have clients that are people and not companies (usually book authors needing websites from us).
On the lead record it is: Susan Jones (first, last).
When we convert the lead to an account (i.e. after they pay us) it becomes Jones, Susan as the account record (note the comma.) Sometimes we will add the name of the book in the Account name Jones, Susan - Gone With The Breeze (we use a dash but not really necessary.)
We rarely use a contact record. Our victims are either Leads or Accounts… and we do the conversion when we’ve been paid.
If we start out with a company we just use the Last Name field of the Lead record: Big Build Architects.
We keep it simple and don’t try to overthink it!