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Importing Contacts that are related to multiple accounts

Bob Bundy

Hello - 

We're migrating a legacy home-grown CRM to Sugar (Ent V10.0 on-prem).  We're running through all the various imports, fine-tuning them before the production cut-over.

We've imported Accounts and grabbed the Account ID from Sugar to put it in the other imports.

We have CONTACT records that are related to multiple ACCOUNTS.  

The CONTACT import template has a column for a single ACCOUNT.  If we put the same CONTACT in the file with different ACCOUNT IDs, we get multiple records of the same CONTACT.  If we do the duplicate checking, it imports the first CONTACT but marks all the rest as duplicates.

I am aware of this article describing how to manually link CONTACTS to an ACCOUNT - https://support.sugarcrm.com/Knowledge_Base/Accounts_Contacts_Leads/Understanding_the_Accounts-Contacts_Relationship/.

It is a manual process.  I'm guessing we have to manually go into each ACCOUNT and link an existing CONTACT record.  But before we manually start linking a few hundred records, I thought I'd ask to see if there's a way via the import routines that we're just not seeing.

Thank you for your help.

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    Hello,

    Your question will probably lead you far from a simple technical answer :) This starts by looking at the business use case. 

    We've encountered this question several times, and each company has a different approach. For many, a contact is not, actually, linked to several companies. Why? because contacts often have different titles, phone numbers, email addresses etc. in the different companies they work for. 

    While you can add more phone/email fields on the contact module, you will not be able to automatically determine which email is linked to which company. 

    Until Sugar lets you add information to the relationship itself (title, phone, email...), multiple contact-account links will require either:

    1. An intermediary module that carries specific information (title, phone, email...) and the relationships to the contact and the account. Database-wise it's clean, but it breaks some features (Sugar Connect for instance). Also the standard import feature will not let you import the relationships for this custom module. 
    2. Pseudo duplicates, ie 1 contact record for each "contact context". Additionally you can create a contact-contact relationship if you want to map which contact is brother/sister to which and even create a "master contact" if you want to aggregate stats for instance. 

    This may feel like one of those "tell me what you need, I'll tell you how to do without" moments, but I assure you that these questions are (often) vital.

    So tell us more about your context, and we can look into this. Plus I'm sure others from the community will be happy to chime in. 

    Damien Pochon

    CRM & Digital consultant @ ITS4U Group

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  • 0

    Hello,

    Your question will probably lead you far from a simple technical answer :) This starts by looking at the business use case. 

    We've encountered this question several times, and each company has a different approach. For many, a contact is not, actually, linked to several companies. Why? because contacts often have different titles, phone numbers, email addresses etc. in the different companies they work for. 

    While you can add more phone/email fields on the contact module, you will not be able to automatically determine which email is linked to which company. 

    Until Sugar lets you add information to the relationship itself (title, phone, email...), multiple contact-account links will require either:

    1. An intermediary module that carries specific information (title, phone, email...) and the relationships to the contact and the account. Database-wise it's clean, but it breaks some features (Sugar Connect for instance). Also the standard import feature will not let you import the relationships for this custom module. 
    2. Pseudo duplicates, ie 1 contact record for each "contact context". Additionally you can create a contact-contact relationship if you want to map which contact is brother/sister to which and even create a "master contact" if you want to aggregate stats for instance. 

    This may feel like one of those "tell me what you need, I'll tell you how to do without" moments, but I assure you that these questions are (often) vital.

    So tell us more about your context, and we can look into this. Plus I'm sure others from the community will be happy to chime in. 

    Damien Pochon

    CRM & Digital consultant @ ITS4U Group

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