Adding Company Accounts
Watch our tutorial video “How to Add an Account”.
To get started with your CRM the first thing you will need to do is to add some Company Accounts. Accounts are the companies you do business with.
Add Accounts Individually
On the left hand Main Menu, click on Accounts to view your Accounts – here you’ll see the demo accounts that have been pre-loaded in your CRM. You can delete these at any time by going to Settings, Data Management, then Delete Demo Data.
If you are just starting out and have just a few Accounts to load you can add them one at a time using the ‘+ Add’ button. Complete the details for the new account and Save. The only mandatory fields are the Account Name and Account Owner. The Account Owner is the person in your organisation responsible for managing that account. The CRM will automatically create a dropdown list of your CRM Users in the Account Owner field for you to select from.
Bulk Data Import
If you already have data stored in another format (e.g. spreadsheets, Outlook, another CRM system) you can import the data in bulk to your CRM. Do watch our Data Import video to help you. You will need to prepare your data as a .CSV file. If you use any specific terminology to describe your data fields you may also want to read up on Custom Settings for your CRM.
When you are ready to start importing your data, in Settings, at the top of your screen, go to Data Management then Import Data. Find out more about Importing Data.
Editing Company Accounts
Clicking an Account Name from the Accounts list will take you directly to that Account.
Click Edit to change the data. Make any changes that you want and then click save. If you make changes and don’t click save, they won’t be saved! Click Delete to delete the account.
Detailed Account Page
Most of the fields are self-explanatory:
- Web site – can be entered as either www.domain.com or http://www.domain.com
- Type – the list may include Prospect (somebody who you are trying to sell to), Suspect (somebody who is in your target marketplace but you not currently trying to have a dialogue with), Customer (somebody who has previously bought from you). You can control what appears in the dropdown list by editing the Custom Dropdown Lists
- Owner – the account manager for this account
- Sector – the type of business the account is in (manufacturing, retail, finance, public sector). Again, this dropdown list can be changed to meet your business needs
- SIC – is a code and stands for “Standard Industrial Classification” and your marketing department may be using these to segment the database
- Source – where this account came from
- Contacts – the individual people at that company account. You can delete a contact by ticking the ‘delete’ checkbox to the left of the contact and then clicking the “Delete” button. You can add a new contact by clicking ‘+ Add’ or simply by typing in their details under the existing contacts and clicking the “Save” icon. You can edit an existing contact by clicking on their name
- Tasks – all the tasks associated with that account, for example, meetings, calls, events. Overdue tasks are shown in red. Like the Contacts, you can edit a Task by clicking on the date, delete it by ticking the ‘delete’ box and then clicking ‘Save’, and add a new task by clicking ‘+ Add’. The Owner of the Task is shown on the right hand side in the column ‘ititials’
- Activities – all the Activities that have taken place with this account. You can add, edit and delete these in the same way as Tasks
- Opportunities – all the sales Opportunities belonging to this account. You can add, edit and delete these in the same way as Tasks and Activities
- Documents – any documents associated with this account that have been uploaded. You can open a document by clicking on it’s name. You can upload a new document by clicking on the “+ Add” button.
- Campaign details – If your company is using the Marketing module you will also see all the campaign details for Contacts in this account
Account Permissions
Whether you can view and edit an Account depends upon your security permissions. Accounts that you can’t view won’t have hyperlinks from the Accounts list page, and those you can’t edit won’t have Save and Delete buttons. This security is explained in the Data Security section.
Restoring a Deleted Account
You can restore an Account that has been accidentally deleted from the Recycle Bin. Go to Settings and Data Management/Recycle Bin. Check the box on the left of the grid against the Account to be restored and click ‘Restore’.
Duplicate Accounts Check
When you create a new Account the CRM will check if an Account with the same name already exists and warn you. It will do this after you’ve completed the Account Name field and before you’ve entered the rest of the page, to save you filling the whole page in only to realise that the Accounts is already in your CRM system. You’ll get a message on your screen warning you. You can choose to ignore the warning by clicking the “ignore” button.
If you are importing bulk data the system will automatically merge any duplicates in your data.
Importing Duplicate Data
If you are importing data to your CRM the system will automatically find duplicate records during the data import process and merge them.
With Really Simple Systems CRM you can easily merge and copy Accounts.
In the Accounts page, select the Account you wish to copy or merge using the checkbox on the left hand side of the table. With this action a new function button ‘More’ will appear above the table. Clicking on this button will give you a dropdown list of the functions available i.e. ‘Copy’ and ‘Merge’. Clicking ‘Copy will create a copy of the Account. Clicking ‘Merge’ will display the option to search and select the Account you wish to merge to.
Please note:
- Only 2 records can be merged at one time.
- Data from the source record will not overwrite the data in the destination record, unless the field is blank.
For example, when merging account A (the source record) to account B (the destination record), if the city field in Account A is ‘Bristol’ and the city field in Account B is ‘London’, the merged Account will show ‘London’. However, if the city was blank in Account B it will display ‘Bristol’ in the end result.
