What is the best way to track companies with multiple offices?
We have tried having just one entry for the company as well as one entry per location with the city name included in the company name line. When there is just one company it's unclear where the client is and when there is more than one company the automatic association with the domain starts connecting contacts to the first company created. Neither seems like a great solution.
I'm sure we aren't the first to have this problem but I haven't found anyone else post about how they deal with it either.
What about when there is not a parent-child relationship. For example, multiple departments of a Federal, State, or Local government? To drill down further; county fire, police, social services often use the same domain.
Same thing, set the domain as the parent and then each department or office as a child.
One of the key things I learned using the function is that whichever company is set up first is the one new contacts will default to. You will probably want to make sure you set the parent up first because of this.
You can use the parent/child feature a few ways. I found it works best for me to have new contacts default to the parent and then manually move them to the child with the goal of having no contacts in the parent. It's easy to check the parent once in a while and when you see a contact reassociate them with the correct company. Alternatively, you could have each contact associated with both the parent and child.
Unfortunately dealing with one domain for multiple companies is a very manual process however you choose to manage it.
Is there some practical guidance for this? What is the best practice way to manage these multiple cities for companies without a separate domain name? Meaning - do you name the Child {company name "City" } and then create the child-parent relationship? I assume that you then would have to turn off the auto associate function. For this company for example. How would I name one of the European offices and the association as they all have the same email and domain URL ending?