Automatically Create Companies from Contacts

[#1]

Many people assume that ACT! does this already and are somewhat perplexed to find that it doesn't. We also need to be able to automatically create companies when importing contact data. Probably the best way to handle this would be to have some additional options in Preferences.

Option 1 - Do not automatically create Companies from Contacts.

Option 2 - Always create a new company if it doesn't exist when adding a new contact and automatically add to a company if it already exists.

Option 3 - Always create and link a new company if it doesn't exist when adding a new contact and automatically link to the company if it already exists.

Jeff

[#2]

Jeff, this would be good. I think you do need to have the options as there will always be users that want to have it one way or another.

Having said that I would suggest that option 3 should be the default. We spend an inordinate amount of time training and cajoling clients to create companies. It is a highly under-utilised side of the application. That is mostly because there is so much work involved in manually creating contacts and then linking all the conacts to it.

[#3]

I think another option should be to ask when adding a contact - similar to the way you can have it ask when adding a contact with more than 2 names how it should parse it.

Sometimes, you do want a new company... and sometimes you might not.

This might make a better default option.

Options 1,2,3 above should also be available for Imports... obviously my one wouldn't apply there :-)

[#4]

This is one of the more requested features we see--would be extremely helpful.

[#5]

Hi Jeff,

Yes this is definitely one I get asked about regularly. Would be a great addition and massive time saver.

[#6]

Good suggestion.

[#7]

And... we also need the ability to automatically create Companies from existing contacts in the database.

Jeff

[#8]

I've written a small application for a client that takes all the contacts in a database and creates companies from the existing contacts (and links them to the companies). It also has a button that deletes all the companies from a database (so that you can create a whole new set of companies).

I will be posting the application on our site 123-addons.com next week for anyone interested.

T

[#9]

I just posted the application on our site. It is called Create Companies from Contacts for ACT!. It does 2 things: one, it creates companies from the company field; It has some logic that prevents it to create duplicate companies. Second, it has a delete button that will delete all the companies. We will be posting it on the ACT! Addon products store as time allows, but it can now be downloaded from 123-addons.com .

[#10]

I agree that this would be valuable.    The simplest, and perhaps most obvious, would be to be able to highlight a range of contacts (presumably sorted by company) in contact list view, right-click, and select an option to create a company from the contacts and link them.  Where you now have "Add Contacts to Company", just add the option "Create Company and Add Contacts".

[#11]

This is a great feature request.....would you expect that the Company name would have to be an exact match to recognize it as an existing company?