Companies and contacts

Companies

Companies in the Support rail lists the organisations you support, with their domain, how many contacts they have and how many tickets.

A company can have several domains. That matters because domains are how inbound mail finds its way to the right customer: an email from someone@northwind.example is recognised as Northwind Traders without anyone having to add that person first.

Edit a company and you can add a domain row for each one it uses. Acquisitions are the usual reason — a company that bought another one often keeps both sides’ mail running for years, and mail from the domain you haven’t listed lands in the catch-all instead of on their record. A domain belongs to one company only, so if you type one that’s already taken the form tells you which company has it rather than quietly splitting the routing.

“Company” is one table across the whole app. The same Northwind Traders you support is the one you bill and the one you sell to — Add existing on this page is for pulling a company you already have in Sales into the Service Desk’s view, rather than making a second copy of it.

Companies can be marked internal — that’s for PTO, training and R&D, the things you book time against that aren’t customers.

If it already exists, the form says so

Start typing a name or a domain into New company and the form checks as you go. If that company already exists it tells you which one, and offers the right button: Open it when the Service Desk already has it, or Add to Service Desk when it’s a company Sales knows and this module doesn’t. Either way you end up on the company that exists instead of a second copy of it. Near-miss names (“Acme” while “Acme Corp” is on the books) get a mention too — nothing stops you, but nobody has to work out afterwards which one the tickets went to.

When the same company is on the books twice

It happens: “Presidio” and “Presidio, Inc.” are the same business, and each has half the tickets. Merge — on a company’s page in the Service Desk or Sales, and on each row of the Time Tracking companies list — folds one into the other.

Pick the other record, choose which one survives, and you get a summary of what moves before anything happens: tickets, contacts, projects, invoices, portal access, domains. The record you don’t keep is then deleted, so there’s no archived twin left behind to pick by mistake.

A merge can't be undone

Everything moves rather than being copied, and the record you merged away is gone. Read the summary first. If two of the companies have an active project with the same name, the merge stops and says so — rename or archive one of them, then merge.

It’s an admin action: you need to be a Time Tracking admin, the same permission that lets you archive a company.

Contacts

Contacts lists the people. Each has a name, an email, the company they belong to, and their access — whether they can sign in to the customer portal.

One person, one row

A contact and a CRM contact are the same human. The list marks people who exist in both, and editing the person in one place is editing them in both. That’s deliberate: the alternative is Dana Okafor existing twice with two different phone numbers and nobody knowing which is current.

Because it’s one person, New contact checks the email as you type. If that address is already a contact it says who and where, and links you to them — including when they’re archived, which the list hides until you tick Show archived. If the address belongs to someone who’s only in the CRM so far, creating the contact links to that same person rather than making a second one, and the form tells you before you save: the name and phone already on file are the ones that stick.

The Sales module’s Contacts page shows the same people through a different lens, with a filter across the top: CRM only, Both, Support only, All people. Support-only contacts are the ones who raise tickets but aren’t part of any deal; CRM-only are the ones you’re selling to who’ve never contacted support. Neither list is the “real” one — they’re two views of the same people.

Portal access

A contact with no access can still raise tickets by email; they just can’t sign in and look at them. Granting access sends them an invitation to the customer portal — see What your customers see.

Satisfaction surveys

Contacts can be individually excluded from satisfaction surveys, and the list has a filter to show you exactly who is. Use it for the automated mailboxes and the people who’ve asked not to be surveyed — otherwise your satisfaction numbers slowly fill up with noise.