topic Re: Difference between company and contact in Dashboards & Reporting

Re: Difference between company and contact

klkitchens — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 23:11:06 GMT

I hate to resurrect this post, but better I suppose than asking all over again.

Can a contact belong to more than 1 company?
Can a contact be as simple as an email address with no name? For example, we have customers in our system that is a combination of your company and contact. But we have multiple emails and phone numbers for that customer that we're having a hard time splitting and synching up in a good way with HubSpot. Seems we should have set up our customers as companies and all the underlying contact information as one offs? It's not a neat 1:1 this number is for this person as sometimes the number is a landline that could belong to more than one contact. I know with email, it's not allowed to be duplicated among contacts, but sometimes emails are also for distribution lists and more than one contact PERSON would have the same email.

Re: Difference between company and contact

Jnix284 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:13:15 GMT

Hi @klkitchens, yes, you can associate one contact to multiple companies. Likewise you can associate multiple contacts to a single company.

This is all done through association, you can either do this manually (via the company or contact record) by clicking +company on the contact record (or +contact on the company record):

If you have a way to identify the associations needed, you can either export your data and reimport it with the additional associations or use a tool like Associ8 to automate via workflow.

Re: Difference between company and contact

karstenkoehler — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 05:15:50 GMT

Hi @klkitchens,

@Jnix284 has already made some good points. Here are a few things I would add.

Can a contact belong to more than 1 company?

Yes, by following these steps: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associate-records#add-associations-to-a-record

Can a contact be as simple as an email address with no name?

Yes, having an email address is the most important part about data quality in HubSpot, in that sense, first name and last name can be omitted: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/deduplication-of-contacts-companies-deals-tickets

You're mentionining that you have email address that are shared inboxes for your customers. You can still create these as separate contact records. In fact, if you want to send emails to them, they must be contact records. For these contacts, I'd recommend two things:

Do not use placeholders for first name, last name or similar fields. HubSpot lets you choose placeholders in templates, emails etc and pre-filling the fields will typically make it harder to come up with a sensible logic.
Mark these contacts with a single-checkbox property (e.g. "Shared inbox") so that they can be easily filtered or excluded. There might be scenarios where you want to be able to find these quickly.

Best regards!