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Introduction to the Contact Register

The Contact register is where you store information about every company and private individual with whom you have contact, be they Customers, Suppliers, shipping companies, factoring or leasing companies, sales leads or individuals who work for those companies. Contact records do not necessarily represent firms that have purchased goods or services from your business, or sold goods or services to you, and in fact can represent any company that is a potential customer or supplier. You should also store information about individual persons in the Contact register: these can be private individuals or people who work for Customers or Suppliers. In the latter case, you will have separate records in the Contact register for the Customer or Supplier and for the individual Contact Person. The Contact Person and the Customer or Supplier will be linked using the Contact Relations register (described here).

The register is accessible from the Sales and Purchase Orders modules, from the Sales and Purchase Ledgers, and from the Contract, Quotations, CRM and Service Orders modules if installed. To open the register, first use the [Switch Module] button in the Navigation Centre to enter one of these modules, Then click (Windows/Mac OS X) or tap (iOS/Android) the [Registers] button, also in the Navigation Centre and double-click or tap 'Contacts' in the resulting list.

The 'Contacts: Browse' window will be opened, showing the Contacts that you have already entered.

If you would like the column showing VAT Registration Numbers to be replaced with one showing the Reg. No. 1 of each Contact, select the Show Reg. No. 1 instead of VAT No. in Contact Browse option in the Contact Settings setting in the Sales Ledger or CRM module.

If you are using Windows or Mac OS X, you can change the sort order by clicking on a column heading. To reverse the sort, simply click once again on the same column heading. The current sort order is marked by the column heading being coloured blue. If you are using iOS or Android, tap on any column heading and choose the sort order you need. Repeat the procedure to reverse the sort.

Searching for a particular Contact depends on whether you are using the Browse Filtering option in the Optional Features setting in the System module, as follows:

  • If you are not using the Browse Filtering option, first sort the list by the column that you want to use for the search. Then, enter the text that you want to find in the Search field in the top of the window (in the top right-hand corner if you are using Windows/Mac OS X) and press the Return key (Mac OS X) or Search (iOS/Android). The first record containing a match for your search string will be highlighted (if you are using Windows, a match will be highlighted as you type each character). For example, to search for a particular Contact Name, sort by Name before entering a Contact Name (or the first few characters) in the Search field.

  • If you are using the Browse Filtering option, all you need to do is to start typing a letter, word, number, or date in the Search field (there is no need to click in the field before typing). As you type each character, non-matching records will be removed from the list. There is no need to sort the list first.
If you are using Windows or Mac OS X, there will be three buttons in the top left-hand corner of the 'Contacts: Browse' window. These are part of the Limited Access feature. You can use them as follows (Windows versions of the buttons illustrated on the left, Mac OS X on the right):

Lists all Contacts.

Lists Contacts where the Salesman field contains the Signature of a user who belongs to the same Sales Group as the current user.

Lists Contacts where the Salesman field contains the Signature of the current user.
You can also prevent a user from seeing all Contacts in the list by restricting their view to their own Contacts or to those of their Sales Group.

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The Contact register in Standard ERP:

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