What belongs on a contact record, and what does not

A contact record is the most reused screen in any CRM and the easiest one to ruin. Every field somebody added for one report stays there afterwards. Adding a field takes a minute. Removing one requires a person to decide it is unnecessary. The form grows until the people filling it in start skipping, and then the business has forty fields and twenty answers.

The cost is not the clutter. It is that reports built on a half completed field are wrong in a way nobody notices, and a business makes decisions from them anyway.

The test is whether somebody uses it on a call

A phone number, an email address, the business name and who to ask for all pass that test immediately. A lead source and a preferred contact method usually pass too, because both change how somebody handles the conversation. An industry classification nobody has ever filtered does not pass. Nor does a second fax number, however tidy the form looks with it.

Diract CRM makes adding a field straightforward. That is exactly why the test matters more here than where every change needs a developer. The constraint has to come from the business rather than from the software.

Separate the person from the business

A builder is a business with three people who ring you, and treating each caller as a separate customer splits the job history three ways. None of the three records then answers what this builder has bought, and a report by customer counts them as three. Diract CRM holds the business as a contact, with the people as linked records of their own. The history stays in one place, and each person keeps their own mobile number.

The same shape solves the catering customer whose office manager orders and whose accounts department pays. Two contacts, one business, and the invoice reaches the right one.

An address is several fields

A single text box holding an address looks efficient and cannot be sorted by suburb, grouped by postcode or fed into a route. Separate lines, suburb, state and postcode cost nothing extra at the point of entry, because somebody is typing the same characters either way. What they buy is every later question. Which customers sit in this suburb, which jobs fall on this side of the city, and which round this new enquiry joins.

For a business whose work happens at addresses, the site deserves its own record rather than a field on the customer. Our guide to site records covers why the access code and the switchboard location belong to a place rather than to whoever booked the job.

Classification earns its place by being filtered

Customer, supplier, staff and partner are worth separating, because nearly every screen in the business narrows by them. A field asking for a customer should never offer a supplier, and a report on purchases should never include a client. A twelve option industry list nobody has filtered in two years is decoration. The honest response is deletion, rather than asking people to keep completing it.

Our guide to choosing a field type covers making a classification that reports cleanly. That mostly means a select list, rather than free text drifting into six spellings.

One or two fields nobody else has

Most businesses hold one or two facts no CRM ships with: a trade account number, a timekeeper level, a strata plan number, a licence expiry. Those are the fields worth adding carefully, because the business genuinely uses them. Diract CRM holds them as real fields rather than a line inside Notes, which is what makes them filterable, reportable and visible on a list.

The tell that something sits in the wrong place is an unwritten convention. Where everybody types the account number on the last line of Notes, that is a field waiting to exist. Our guide to when a Notes field is really a missing table covers telling the two apart.

Required fields, and reviewing the rest

A name and one way to make contact are the minimum any record needs. Anything else made required stops somebody saving a customer halfway through a call. The workaround is a record called Unknown with a mobile number. Diract CRM refuses a record with no name at all, because a list of untitled contacts helps nobody. It leaves every other field optional.

Once a year, a count of how many records have each field completed tells you which fields the business genuinely uses. A field filled in on eight per cent of records is either misunderstood or unnecessary, and both of those are worth knowing. That count is also the only argument that reliably persuades somebody to give up the field they added three years ago.

What to change first

• Every field passes the test of getting used on a call
• The business and the people at it are separate linked records
• The address splits into suburb, state and postcode
• Classification exists only where a screen filters by it
• Site, access and equipment details sit on the work instead
• The one or two facts unique to this business are real fields
• A yearly count of filled fields decides what stays