Contact Classes: General Information

In MYOB Acumatica, you can group contacts into classes based on specific characteristics. The use of contact classes may help you quickly and effectively manage your marketing and sales processes, including lead acquisition, contact creation, conversion of leads to opportunities, creation of customers, and preparation of financial reports.

This topic provides information about contact classes.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

• Create a contact class
• Select the contact class that the system will use by default for each new contact

Applicable Scenarios

You may want to learn how to create contact classes in scenarios that include the following:

• You need to give users the ability to group contacts that represent companies of the same industry, such as banks, supermarkets, or pharmacies.
• You need to give users the ability to group contacts that represent companies of the same business sector, such as manufacturers, merchandisers, or service providers.
• You need to give users the ability to group contacts that have been acquired through such sources as organic search, marketing campaign, or purchased list.
• You need to set up the system to automatically assign new contacts to the appropriate owners.

Defining of Contact Classes

In MYOB Acumatica, you can easily group contacts into classes and gather different sets of additional information about the contacts in each contact class. You can define classes on the Contact Classes (CR205000) form based on your company’s business needs and get a comprehensive view of your business from leads to revenue. Contact classes help you quickly assign contacts to owners, enter the settings of leads, business accounts, and opportunities you create based on the contact, and define a default email account for sending emails to contacts.

A contact class is a grouping entity for contacts that share at least one common characteristic. Contact classes are used for reporting purposes and for providing default values during data entry of individual contacts. When a user creates a contact, the user can first select the applicable contact class, which causes the system to use the values of the class as default values for the contact. The system also loads any attributes—UI elements that you can configure, specifying their names, control types (check box, text box, or combo box), and possible values (for boxes with predefined options)—that you have defined for the class, so that the user can enter these values for the contact.

On the Contact Classes form, you can specify the following settings for each contact class:

• The identifier and description of the contact class.
• The way the system determines the default owner of a contact of the contact class, which can be the user who creates the contact, a user determined through an assignment map, or an owner inherited from the source entity if the contact is created from another entity.
• The map to be used for the automatic assignment of a contact of the class during contact creation if the default owner is determined through an assignment map.
• The identifiers of the lead class, business account class, and opportunity class that the system specifies by default for a new lead, business account, or opportunity created based on a contact of the class. (Thus, the default class settings will be inserted for the new leads, business accounts, and opportunities, so you can create them more quickly.)
• The opportunity stage to be inserted by default for a new opportunity that is created based on a contact of the class.
• The default email account that can be used for sending emails to the contacts of the class.
• The attributes that are listed as additional elements for contacts of the contact class, as well as whether each attribute is required or optional.

If your company no longer needs a particular contact class, you can remove it from the system only if no existing contacts has that contact class specified.

Use of Contact Classes

Contact classes make the creation of contacts faster and more accurate. When a user is creating a contact on the Contacts (CR302000) form and selects a contact class on the CRM Info tab, the system fills in the values specified for the class; these default values can be overridden.

For each contact class, you can define a set of attributes that allow users to specify additional information about contacts within the class. An attribute is a characteristic or quality—such as industry, number of employees, or company revenue—that is important to your company but is not already tracked on the Contacts form. When a user selects a contact class for a new contact, the attributes of this class appear on the Attributes tab of the Contacts form as additional elements for which the user selects the appropriate values. For more information about the use of attributes in MYOB Acumatica, see Attributes.

If a particular contact class is used far more than the others, you can specify the default contact class on the General tab of the Customer Management Preferences (CR101000) form (Data Entry Settings section). The system will insert this default class for each contact that you create in the system. If a default contact class is specified, when a user creates a contact on the Contacts form, the system inserts this class into the Contact Class box of the CRM Info tab. It also inserts the default settings associated with the contact class.

You can also create a contact by using a dialog box on the Leads (CR301000) or Opportunities (CR304000) form. In this case, the system may insert a different class than the default contact class. If a contact class is specified on the Lead Classes (CR207000) or Opportunity Classes (CR209000) form for the class of the source entity from which you are creating the contact, the system inserts this contact class.

If you change the contact class, the system inserts the default settings specified for the newly selected class.

Example of Contact Classes and Attributes

Consider the following example of the use of contact classes and attributes.

Suppose that you sell multiple products to retailers. You handle many contacts and would like to divide them into groups based on whether they are related to a small retail store or to a midsize retail store. You can create two classes for these contacts:

• The Small class, for contacts associated with retail stores: This class might contain an attribute called Interest with the values Juicers, Jams, and Jelly corresponding to the type of product the retail store is interested in, as well as other attributes to give you additional information about these stores.
• The Midsize class, for contacts associated with midsize stores: Because some organizations may be different types, you might define an attribute called Company Type with possible values such as Supermarket and Restaurant.

With these classes and their attributes configured in the system, when a user creates a new contact on the Contacts (CR302000) form and selects a contact class on the CRM Info tab, the attributes of the class appear on the Attributes tab. The user can enter the needed attribute values for this contact.