We don’t recommend copying data from the company to the contact record (copying any data in any system is generally not a good idea).

Instead, the contact is linked to the company that manages the common information.  The common address etc. is accessed by hovering the mouse over the company name, clicking on the company name etc.  When data is exported you are offered the choice of including the company fields in the report etc.

Linked company fields are not included in the “Email vCard” feature, but that’s something we can consider.  An issue there is that a contact can be linked to more than one company.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jun 25, 2010 10:32am

We don’t recommend copying data from the company to the contact record (copying any data in any system is generally not a good idea).

Instead, the contact is linked to the company that manages the common information.  The common address etc. is accessed by hovering the mouse over the company name, clicking on the company name etc.  When data is exported you are offered the choice of including the company fields in the report etc.

Linked company fields are not included in the “Email vCard” feature, but that’s something we can consider.  An issue there is that a contact can be linked to more than one company.

I partly understand the rational behind this, but what happens in this case if a Contact is linked to multiple Companies as happens in many situations? Since Solve does NOT allow two companies to be related; ie a parent company and their subsidiary, or the end customer and the partner/distributor/agent with whom you are working on. You can have a Contact linked to dozens of Companies.

One thing I thought of the other day (since Solve actually let me do it momentarily) is that under a Contact record, you list the Company (this would be the primary Company, usually the one the Contact works for). Then in the Related To field you could enter other Companies, not just Contacts and Project Blogs. So that way the companies would remain separate (and would work for the exporting you described above) and it would be obvious to everyone right away which Company the Contact works FOR, and which Company the Contact with WITH. Yes there is the little field call How Do They Relate but it can get messy, especially if there are lots of relationships.

I have never quite understood the rational of not allowing Companies to be related to eachother, other than ‘business is done with Contacts’ approach but this doesn’t work for everyone. I log everything in the Company record under we close the sale, then we create the Project Blog.

This also avoids the issue that was the subject of this thread here:
http://norada.com/forums/viewthread/1316/
ie if you have lots of Contacts for a Company and all your activity is listed under Contacts, you have to flip through them all to figure out what the heck is going on the Company. But at the end of the day, the Company is the client, we do business with a Company. If employees leave that Company you would loose all the history of the calls, meetings etc if those were all recorded under the Contact record, unless of course you remembered to drag all the data over (which Solve now allows us to do!), or created a second Contact record when the person moved to another Company. In the end, neither are very elegant solutions.

So right now the only solution for people who have end customers with whom you work with via agents/distributor/resellers is to create a custom form field and populate it with those agents/distributors/resellers and use that to relate two companies together. Don’t get me wrong, this works fine (but if your list is long might get messy), but could also be just as easy for people if Companies could be related to eachother and would then allow for the parent-daughter company relationship

Sorry to sound like I’m ranting, I haven’t had my morning croissant yet!

Once a contact is linked to a company the field “how do they relate” is offered.  Here is where you can note where they are currently employed, were employed, etc., creating the helpful context for the company information.

We haven’t enabled company to company links because we wanted to carefully review the various use-cases and implications (once added it’s next to impossible to remove).  We also have a new feature planned that will effect this general area and we want than completed and settled in first.  Your custom form field example has been working well in the situations we’ve worked on.