Associating Contacts Together

Contact relations can be used for many scenarios, but we're going to break it down into two main ones. Firstly, there are companies with specific individuals that work there; decision-makers or other contacts useful to your business. Secondly, companies or contacts who are commercially linked with others, such as a group of companies owned by one organisation.

To make sure you are working in an effective way with your 'Contact' population, Mashoom allows you to reflect these two types of associations in your daily activities by combining the information held, activities already carried out and your tasks to complete in the future.

The time when you create these associations is ideally when you are setting up a new contact on the system be it a company or individual, see instructions on adding a contact. You can also do this as you work on your daily tasks and discover relationships between individuals and companies as well as companies associated with other companies.

You can view and edit relations by finding the Relations box in contact details, to the top right.

There are three headings possible in this box, showing the different types of relationship:

• "Main organisation of" - this contact is the organisation of the related contacts. Usually the contacts listed are employees
• "Main organization" - this contact belongs to the listed organisation, only one organisation can be in this list
• "Associated with" - A more general relation, perhaps where these people or organisations are working together.

Creating Associations

To create or edit associations, press the blue icon titled 'Edit' in the relations box, found on the contact details page. You will now see any existing associations listed on the left of this section and, on the right, under the title 'Add new relation' you will see that contact in the top box.

You can now select one of the two options:

• Is main organisation of
• Is associated with

Choose the one that most accurately describes whether the relationship is one of managing the relationship or working in collaboration, then select the other party in this relationship. Use the arrows to the left hand side to switch which way around the relationship.

If you're associating an employee to a company, it should read [Organisation Contact] is the main organisation of [Employee Contact].

Merged Timelines

You will now see both parties' Timelines - a history of tasks and activities - merged together, in date order, with each entry identified to each party in the association created.