When a Contact leaves a Company.

[NETAlex]

What do people suggest to be the best way of handling contacts who have left a company?

Is there a way of storing them to keep their history without them showing up on contact lists?

[kfredricks]

Hi Alex,  there's not a way to "store" contacts but you can easily change the ID/Status to reflect their change in status.  Here's what I teach my clients to do.  The first thing I do is to pull up the record and go to Edit/Copy; that will put his contact info into the clipboard.  If the person leaving is moving somewhere else I then duplicate his record and then change the pertinent info such as phone number and company name.  I then create a note and "paste" in the clipboard so that I remember where he used to live.  Then I head back to the original contact record and type in the name of the replacement.  I then create a note and paste again so I know that all previous notes and histories were with the "old" guy and all new notes, etc are with the replacement.  Sometimes I even get fancy and use a bit of red in the notes so that it really stands out.

[NETAlex]

I'm managing businesses with varied staff turnover. So when someone leaves, I don't want to lose the jhistory specific to them or have those history notes replaced by someone elses name. 

So at the moment, I have been changing peoples job titles to DEFUNCT (partly because it's an awesome word).

But I was hoping there was a way of 'greying them out' or if there was a seperate, hidden tab. I don't think notes in 'notes' will work and it needs to be easy to recognise without flicking through too many tabs. (via the mobile phone version)

[dshaw111]

You could also change the Field Definition to 'Create a History' to record the change in History.

[gleo]

There isn't going to be an ideal solution here, ACT! isn't going to do prescisely what you want.

If the old data only needs to be available to just one person, say an Administrator the records could be marked private to that record manager. Another option is to export them to another database and if it is Premium you could make that data available via a browser to many users under ACT! Premium for Web   

[jnpurdy]

I like the response from NETAlex.  I do somethig very similar  I add the first name from Jim Anderson to NLT Jim Anderson.

NLT is No Longer There

This way I keep the hisstorical data and I can look up the name by looking up "Contains Fn LN".  I also put in the "Last Results" field "Used to work at ...".

Hope this helps.

[gleo]

You could add NLT to the Contact Name perhaps as a middle name and then it becomes available to the address book so when you are emailing from ACT! or attaching emails you can see immediately if the name is active or just an old entry.