Keep each firm and the people in it as separate records.
Contact & Account Management keeps the firm and the people in it as two different records. One account for Northgate Traders holds the purchase manager, the accounts assistant and the site engineer, each with their own number and what they decide. Orders, quotations and complaints attach to the account and not to a phone.
A dealer, a builder or a factory is never one person. Somebody asks for rates, somebody else releases the purchase order, and a third argues about the pending payment. Small firms save all three under one name in a phone.
Separating the account from its people fixes the awkward part. When the purchase manager moves on, his account keeps its history, and the new person starts from what was agreed.
What your team uses today.
The module takes over these, one at a time, so nothing has to stop while it is set up.
- Phone contacts saved by memory
- A customer sheet with a row for every mobile
- Visiting cards kept in a drawer
The problems this is meant to ease.
What contact & account management does.
What this looks like in a working week.
Illustrative scenarios, written to show the shape of the work. They are not accounts of client systems.
The people who open this every day.
From first conversation to daily use.
Review the customer list
Share your customer sheet or software. A summary lists the firms, people and branches found inside.
Design the account
Decide which roles and terms matter in your trade. Try a trial account. It holds people, branches and terms.
Clean import
After a trial load your staff merge the flagged duplicates. The cleaned list returns for sign-off. Only then does the real load run.
Teach by role
Sales staff, accounts and the owner see their own part. Every role takes home a sheet. It is short and written for their work.
Daily use
Calls and visits are logged on the account from now on. The owner and team go through some accounts. Fields are adjusted as needed.
How you would know it is working.
Record where you stand before it goes live, so the change is measured against your own figures.
- Accounts with a decision maker recorded
- Accounts with no recent activity logged, by executive
- Duplicate firms found and merged
- Open complaints, by account
- Quotations issued against the terms agreed on the account
It is one part of a system, not an island.
A module earns its place by what it passes to the next one. These are the connections we set up most often.
- Lead management
- Quote and proposal management
- Invoice management
- Accounting software
- Credit control
Products that include it.
How we would put it in.
Questions owners ask about contact & account management.
Will the tax ID and address match what is in our accounting software?
That is the point of keeping them here. Master details come over from your accounting software at set-up. They go back when a new customer is created, so the invoice does not carry an address from three years ago.
Does this help if our customers are individuals?
Less so. A retail buyer is one person with one number. Accounts matter when you sell to businesses, where four people share one purchase order and the bill goes to a fifth.
Can we stop executives from seeing every customer?
Yes, accounts can be limited to the executive who handles them, with the branch manager seeing his branch. Owners usually see everything, and that is set when the system goes in.
Why change if the numbers are in our phones?
The phone leaves with the person. It holds a number, and not the rate you agreed, the last complaint, or the three dispatches that went to the wrong warehouse. Send us a list of the accounts whose history sits only in one salesperson’s handset, and we will plan their move.
What goes into the price of an account module?
The size of the customer list to be cleaned, the branches under each firm and the links to quotation or billing. Merging duplicates takes effort. After reading your scope we split the quotation by part, and any link can come out.
How long before sales staff open real accounts?
That follows how tidy the current list is and who approves the merges. Firms, people, branches and the activity log arrive first. Links to quotes and billing follow. You will find dates in the proposal.
Businesses that ask for this.
Modules that work with it.
Tell us how you handle contact & account management today.
A spreadsheet, a register or another system: say which, and we will tell you plainly what is worth changing.
What happens after you share your requirements
- A senior engineer reads your answers. Nobody phones first.
- Within one business day you get a written note: what we understood, what we would start with, and the questions we still have.
- If it fits, a proposal follows with the order of work, what we need from you and what you receive at each step.
- No call is booked and nothing is paid until you have read the note. Your details stay with us.
Start with your requirements
Seven short steps that tell us what you need. A senior engineer reads them before anyone gets in touch.
Share your requirements