Company-To-Company Relationships in Sage CRM
I can easily say the most common request I get when deploying CRM is the need to be able to designate a headquarters for a company and relate the ‘children’ companies back to it. That seems like a pretty simple desire, but natively there’s no easy or functional way to accomplish it.
If you’ve used Sage CRM before, you’ve probably noticed the Relationships tab. Sure, it’s nice to visually link companies, but let’s be real: you’d rather get a list of the companies from a search screen and then perform actions against them, right?
Let’s walk through the process of setting up an ‘Is Headquarters?’ checkbox to designate those companies that can be marked as a Headquarters or ‘parent’ company, setup a search select advanced field called Headquarters on which to link the child to the parent, then add the Headquarters to the search screen.
1. Add the ‘Is Headquarters?’ checkbox and the ‘Headquarters’ search select advanced field to link the parent to the child within the Company entity.
Go to Administration | Customization | Company | Fields (tab)
Add a field with the values below.
2. Add the fields to the Company Summary screen.
Go to Administration | Customization | Company | Screens (tab)
Click on the Company Entry screen aka CompanyBoxLong and add the two new fields in the desired positions on the screen and Save.
3. Add the Headquarters (comp_azlinkhq) to the Company Search screen and Save.
Now that all of the fields are created and on the screens, let’s take a look at the finished product.
ABC Headquarters has a check in the ‘Is Headquarters?’ field indicating that it’s a possible headquarters to which another company can be linked. ABC Tampa and ABC Los Angeles are both branches of ABC that are tied to ABC Headquarters.
As you can see, these three simple steps have added a lot of function and value to Sage CRM and it can all be accomplished by a system administrator!
The SQL portion of the setup on a Search Select Advanced field is optional and was added in this scenario in order to limit the number of options within the Headquarters field itself.
The concept of using Search Select Advanced fields to link records in Sage CRM is not only limited to Companies, but can be applied to People, Opportunities or combinations of the various entities in CRM. The setup is simple and the result is invaluable.