Accounts, Companies, Contacts, Users. How do they all mix?

[e_wilber]

Imagine a scenario where you have a company that has their own internal users that they need to support with Incident Management and they also need to support external customers.

They also have a unique situation where they are their own customer, so they need to be able to log cases on behalf of themselves as well as incidents.

My question is - what do you do with companies and accounts if they are shared between the Incidents and Accounts?

Do you:

• Create them as an Account and a Company record separately as different records, where CSM and INC will use their respective version of this record?
• Create them all as an Account and update the reference qualifiers on Incidents to look at accounts instead of companies? If this is the case, what about other processes down the road (such as assets)? Any downside impact?
• Create them all as Companies and update the qualifiers in CSM to look at Companies instead? Knowing how the CSM account hierarchy works, I don't expect this is a good decision.
• ???

[Allen Andreas]

Hello,

The Account table extends from the Company table.

Companies are for internal use and related to various vendors and such that are involved with your actual company.

Accounts are for your customers.

Once an entity has been identified as a customer of your company and you have CSM, then should only be creating Cases. Everything starts as a case.

If there's a scenario where the case is created and it's due to your company's fault (i.e., your service is down), then an Incident would be created and related to that case.

Contacts are your customer account's user base.

Users are your internal organizations user base.

If your company is also a customer of your own self (I would imagine in a company structure there's some sort of separation there -- as legally I don't think that's allowed), then you would be a separate account for that consuming entity.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[morr]

@Allen Andreas thank you for helping to break this down. I have a tricky scenario that I am trying to find a resolution for. My company purchased the CSM but for some reason when initially setting up our customer database they entered them straight into the core_company table and did NOT create the accounts first. I am trying to figure out if I can somehow get Accounts created without duplicating the companies that already exist as we have over 4,000 companies already in our system. Any ideas?!

[balaganesh]

Hi Morr, You should be doing the class conversion for your company records (core_company -> customer_account) with the help of fix script or scheduled job.