Hello,

We are using Maximizer Enterprise. We have a server on a peer to peer network and several laptops

The records (Which are in fact companies) in our database have been entered as "Individuals" - some with several contacts. I'd like to know:

Is there a compelling reason to convert them to "Companies" - it seems that it eliminates duplicates when transferring - as it is now, If I change a first or last name and then use transfer to update one of the the laptops, the laptop keeps the old name and inserts the new - this does not seem to happen with "Companies" - this is good, However it seems to create problems of its own - ie if I convert an existing record (Create a duplicate entry/convert...) all of the UDF's show up under the old main contact and the new "Company" record has none

Any ideas?

Also - I plan to synch remote sites and will have to go to MaxExchange - will this solve the duplicate problem?

Thanks

Kirk

Hi Kirk,

I would convert the records whether it solve your current transfer problem or not! The reason for this is that what you will be doing is making sure that the record types Company are in fact all companies and individuals are all individuals. This may sound a bit daft, its the same idea as making sure that say the industry code for your clients is a table field not a free text field.

The reason behind all of this is it makes sure that your data remains clean and searchable, which means you can use search it better to target the people in certain groups to sell to them better. It may not be a big issue in a small company but what you end up doing is having sales people all using the same descriptions of industries etc whihc means they can swap clients without any trouble etc.

It is worth it in the long run.

The problem with the UDFs is dependant on how the UDF's are setup, any UDF's which are Company and Individual only will go to the Company, but any UDF's which are on Contacts as well will move from the individual to the Contact as they may be the description of the person not the company.

We have a tool for converting Individuals to Companies and Contacts it called MaxSplitter its very inexpensive and can be found on www.cabc.co.uk

If you are using several databases and transferring records back and forth then Maxexchange will resolve your duplicates problem in the future and give you an easier way if working, it replicates the database it doesn't transfer it in the same sense.

Hopefully this has helped a bit,

Nick Welburn
CABC Support