Contacts and Contact Methods are two different concepts that we felt needed a small amount of explaining.
Contacts
Contacts belong to Businesses, Franchises and Locations. They can represent people, decision makers, owners, and managers for the Accounts they belong to, or they can represent Internal Staff. They can be clients but DO NOT represent authorized Client Users of the system. They can CONTAIN one or many Contact Methods.
Note: Contacts are ALWAYS optional.
Optional Contact Form
Contact Methods
Contact Methods BELONG TO Contacts or Accounts. They are currently Phone Numbers and/or Email Addresses.
Phone Numbers
You can give Contacts one OR Many Phone Numbers, you cannot have more than one Main Phone Number.
The 'Other' drop down option turns into a text box and allows you to type in whatever value you would find useful in describing the Phone Number (iPhone, for example).
The numbers themselves are Masked, meaning you can only enter valid characters in the input. In this case, numbers.
Email Addresses
This is pretty straightforward. Again, you can only have ONE Main Email per Contact. Please be sure to enter a VALID email address. We don't validate for their accuracy.
Note: Emergency Contacts also discusses Contacts and how they relate to Locations, Patrol Work Orders, and the Patrol Process.
Contact Methods List Item Precedence
Accounts with Contacts, Businesses, Franchises, and Locations, can themselves have Phone Numbers independent of Contacts. Those are known as Account Phone Numbers. This makes sense when there aren't any particular individuals associated with a business line; the 1-800 customer service number for LinkedIn, for example.
In the Businesses, Franchises, and Locations Lists, there is a third line in the multi-line List Item view that contains a Contact Method. That value is intelligently populated. Here's the order in which it populates:
Since List Items can only display one Contact Method out of possibly many, we reasoned that there should be precedence in which multiple Phone Numbers get displayed in a List Item. That goes as follows:
- Main, if no Main then...
- Mobile, if no Mobile then...
- Other, if no Other then...
- Fax
If there are NO Contacts associated with an Account, the List Item will display any Account Phone Numbers. If there are no Account Phone Numbers, that third List Item line will simply appear empty.
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