Organize and segment your Company list into different categories for better management and reporting, letting you shape Accelo to match just what your business needs.
Using this guide, you can:
What are Categories?
Use your Category fields to group your Companies and Contacts to turn your client data into rich data, data that's organized, streamlined, and above all else, useful. Easily categorize your client data by creating the Category name and creating the category options on the fly - you provide the categories and we'll take care of the rest.
When creating a company, easily segment your data by choosing a category from a drop-down list. For example, your company records can be divided by the industry they are in, their size, the products they are using, etc.
Note - categories can only be created for Companies, Contacts, and Affiliations.
Common categories includes:
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Industry - what industry does the company operate in?
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Size - roughly, how many staff does the company have?
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Source - how did this company become known to us?
Each of these fields has a set of options which you can choose from to help segment your data so that it is useful in searching, filtering, and reporting.
Should I use Category or Custom Profile Field?
Choose the best option based on the type of data that you're adding to a company, how you’d like to use this data, and when you wish to enter this data.
Use Categories when it's a set, defined value that will be used to filter through different groups of companies, such as the industry. Categories can only be defined on the Companies, Contacts, and Affiliations pages.
Custom Profile Fields can be created with more than a multi-select dropdown option. The information can be stored as text, numbers, a url, and can be useful to record information such as a company's Twitter account or specific notes regarding billing. These can be seen in the Company Descriptions across many Module types, ie - Sales Types, Project Types, Ticket/Issue Types, etc. Custom Profile Fields can be defined and edited across all records within that module.
Add or Edit a Category
Categories by definition must have options which are limited, so that you can actually segment your data properly. You cannot create a category that is a free text field. Typically, category fields have a handful of fixed options which the user must choose.
To add a category:
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Navigate to Configuration under the Modules button.
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Select Categories under Companies & Contacts.
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Click the Add Category button.
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On the following page, you'll enter the values associated with your category.
- Title - e.g. you can enter "Scale of Operations," which might have values of "local," "regional," "national," and "international."
- Required - Choose if this field is mandatory and should it be available when you create a new record.
- Exclusive - Choose if there is only a single value for the category. If you can choose multiple values, leave this blank.
- Leaf Only - If you group values under a parent value, choose if users should only be able to select the child (leaf) values.
- Status - Easily mark the category Inactive if no longer in use.
To edit categories:
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To edit the fields for an existing category, simply click the edit icon on the right-hand side in the Categories list view.
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Once you've setup a new Category, you'll want to setup the available Category Values.
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To remove/delete a category, click the edit icon on the right and change the status to Inactive.
Add or Edit Category Values (Options)
To add or edit a category value, first click into Category Name, e.g. Industry. This will take you to a list of its existing values . On the right side, our system gives you a tally of records that have that value selected.
Click the Add Option button to add a new value. Then configure the various options on the page:
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Title - Give the segment a title.
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Parent - Choose if this segment should have a parent (and therefore be a child option).
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Status - Set the status to Active (the default option).
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Ordering - If there are other categories at this level, and you are editing an existing value, you can set the order of this category here. Otherwise, it will default to "new entry".
You can permanently remove a category value using the recycle bin on the right. Existing records will lose this segmentation information. The recommended alternative is to change the category status to "inactive".
- To add a child category, use the add button on the right side of the segment in the list.
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To edit existing categories, simply click the name of a category.