# Managing Contacts

This chapter describes the general principles behind the management of contact data in the system. As most of these principles also apply to specific contact details like crew data, supplier details etc. all modules with contact management feature will refer to this chapter.

# Addresses

Each contact in the system can have more than one address. A typical example is having a business address and private address for a single person. The ZeeBORN system comes with pre-defined address categories you can use for collecting address data.

If you collect more than one address for a contact you can define a default address. This default address will be used as the preferred address in printouts and reports and while assigning contact data to a document (e.g. assigning a supplier to an purchase order document).

# E-Mail Addresses, Phone Number, Fax Numbers ...

For each contact record you can collect an unlimited number of communication details like e-mail addresses and phone numbers. The ZeeBORN system comes with a set of pre-defined list of communication detail types that can be extended on demand. Based on the communication type you assign to an entry the system knows for instance what entries to be used as an e-mail address for creating e-mail messages.

# Using Categories

All contacts in the system can be organized in categories. The assignment of a contact record to a category can be done manually. In many cases you will also see that contact records will be assigned automatically to a category. This happens for instance while creating a new crew records in the Crewing module or while choosing a contact record as a supplier for a purchase order in the Purchasing module. Some of these automatically assigned categories are so called system categories (like in the given example for a crew member that will be assigned to category "Crew"). Usually these system categories cannot be modified by the user since the categories are also used for the internal assignment of contact data to the single modules in the ZeeBORN system.

# Managing Company Contacts and Related Contacts

The ZeeBORN system allows the structured management of contact details. One of these supported structures is the management of contacts within a company. In fact the structure of a company and the contacts within a company is created very simple by creating first a contact that will be flagged as a company record (button New Company Address). Later on you can create normal contact records (button New Contact) and while entering the contacts details you can also choose one of the available company contact records from the database.

If assign a contact record to a company you will be asked if you want to take over address details and communication details from the company contact record. You can copy all available address and communication details or only a part of the available data. After copying these details from the assigned company contact you can change these data without affecting the original details in the company contact record.

# Managing Assistants Contacts

For most of the contact records in the system you can also assign an assistant contact. If you want to use this feature, you will need to create the assistants contact record first before being able to assign this as an assistant to another contact in the database.