Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Working with Accounts and Contacts

Account and contact records, as well as related lead and opportunity records, hold much of the primary information that your team has or will collect. Depending on the nature of your business, you may use one or both types of records. Microsoft CRM continually refers to accounts, contacts, and customers, so it's important to keep the terms straight. Accounts are companies, contacts are people, and customers can be either companies or people.

Assuming for the moment that you sell to other businesses and that you use account records, you'll also need to use contact records. Each account record can have multiple people (contact records) associated with it. The larger the account, the more people you likely need to track.

If you sell only to individuals, you may never actually use account records to track your customers. In all likelihood, however, you'll want to track more than just your customers in Microsoft CRM. For example, keeping track of your company's vendors in the same database is useful. Your competitors may also be candidates for their own account records if you don't create actual competitor records for them. If you're strictly a B2C company, you will probably still encounter situations like these where you need the account record.

In this chapter, we describe how you add new accounts and contacts and how best to use and access those records after you create them.

Adding and Editing Contacts

You can add a contact record that stands ...