I appreciate this is quite a change to your data model, but having separation/hierarchy of customer/contact would make a lot more sense than the current model.
Having a company entity (customer/supplier) with the core fields and a separate entity for contacts (with contact specific fields) which can be related/associated to the company record would follow the model of account/contact used in most CRM systems.
This becomes a problem when there are multiple contacts for a given customer that are being engaged on separate projects.
Hey Matt.
Firstly, thanks for the suggestion, it’s really good to hear about this kind of thing.
You’re right that this would mean a pretty fundamental shift in the way that contacts are handled in FreeAgent. As this is the API forum, it’s perhaps not the best place to go into this too much, but if you wouldn’t mind giving me more information on your use case here, “This becomes a problem when there are multiple contacts for a given customer that are being engaged on separate projects” I’ll pass this on to the relevant Product Manager for this area.
Cheers
Stu McEwan
Core Services: API - Product Manager
Thanks Stu.
It becomes a problem using FA and creating an Invoice (for example), the drop down only shows the Organisation name. So if you have 3 contacts (let’s say: ‘Rod’, ‘Jane’ and ‘Freddy’) at a customer (let’s call them ‘Rainbow Ltd’) you have no way of knowing which is the contact you’re selecting.
There is also no way of connecting/relating these three contacts to a parent record (an Account), allow me to elaborate: most CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce or Dynamics CRM) have the concept of an Account (a business/customer) and Contact (a person) - this is analogous to the FA relationship between Project and Contact. So, if FA had the concept of Account (or business/customer/whatever) that had contacts associated to it, and (as you have) Projects associated to Contacts the model would follow that which most CRM systems have.
I’m creating some integration between FA and Dynamics and am looking to map the Account/Contact/Opportunity records to their equivalents in FA:
Dynamics > FA
Opportunity > Project
Contact > Contact
Account > Contact
I can store the Id of the records created in FA as foreign keys in CRM (it would be really handy to have the Id returned as a separate field rather than just the URL - see: Please include id in responses).
This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who would really appreciate a change to the FA data model that included the Account (business/customer/whatever) as well as Contact.