A company within Repfabric can be made to be a ‘child’ of another company. To make a company a child company, use the lookup button in the parent field to find and declare the parent company and then click save.
Use the ‘Reset’ link beside the parent name to remove the parent when necessary.
For customer-type companies, parent-child relationships can gather all the locations of a chain of customers under one corporate office.
For manufacturers, parent-child relationships can describe different business units of a single entity, or even different vendors for a Buy/Resell distributorship.
In some cases, manufacturers can also be customers of the rep firm for other lines. Typically that type of manufacturer is set up twice – the first time as a manufacturer, and the second time as a customer. The customer version of the manufacturer can be set up as a child of the manufacturer, so that the manufacturer’s contacts will be shared with the child account.
There are two features of Repfabric that make use of parent-child relationships.
In Sales Reports, both the Customer Summary and the Manufacturer Summary reports have a checkbox option to Summarize by Parent Company. When clicked, the reports gather requested sales values under the parents’ names only – child account names will not be displayed.
For contact management, parent company contacts are co-associated with child companies. This means that parent contacts are available to be looked up and used for child companies whenever a child company is specified. And all parent company contacts are displayed in blue on the Contacts tab of any child company.