Primary Contact Manager

To reach the Primary Contact Manager, select MAIN TASKS >> PRIMARY CONTACT MANAGER from the menu on top of the Main Invoice Screen.

AnyOrder has two contact managers. The first, which has always been a part of the AnyOrder package, is the Customer Contact Manager. The Customer Contact Manager works hand-in-hand with the Customer Database. For each of your customers in the database, you can have one or more contacts. For example, if you deal with a large customer company, you may deal with one person that handles the ordering, and another that handles payments, and still another that is in charge in-house advertising of your products.

The Primary Contact Manager, on the other hand, can be utilized for a variety of other purposes. It can be utilized for prospective customers. If a prospective customer eventually purchases from you, it's quite easy to paste the customer's name and address to an invoice (or to the Customer Database). It can be used for suppliers, listing of sales personnel, information on advertising firms, addresses of shipping companies, individuals to contact for financial assistance, etc.

You may wish to organize your contacts under separate categories. The "Category" field in the upper right hand corner of the Primary Contact Manager is used for this purpose. For example, you might set up categories for Suppliers, Prospects, Shipping, and Financial. You can instruct AnyOrder to place all similar categories together by selecting TOOLS >> ORDER BY CATEGORY.

The fields on Primary Contact Manager are color coded. The colors are useful for five purposes:

1. The business or individual is a prospective customer who you might later paste to an invoice

2. The business or individual is a prospective customer who you might later paste into the Customer Database

3. A prospective customer who you might later paste into Customer Database Contact Manager

4. The individual is someone who you plan to contact again and you wish to have AnyOrder remind you to do so

5. Extra fields - these fields are used in the contact manager only and are not used elsewhere in the program

1. The business or individual is a prospective customer who you might later paste to an invoice

Contacts in the Primary Contact Manager can be pasted directly to invoices on the Main Invoice Screen.

For invoice pasting, the important fields in the Contact Manager are colored in blue. These fields include: name, address1, address2, address3 (if you use it), city, state/province, postal code, and country. The name field is pasted to the "Bill To" field on the Main Invoice Screen. While the rest (address1, address2, etc.) are pasted to their respective fields.

To paste a contact, start in the Main Invoice Screen. Create a new invoice if you haven't already. Then select EDIT >> PASTE FROM PRIMARY CONTACT MANAGER. A list of your contacts appears. Select the correct contact, and their name and address will be pasted in place.

2. The business or individual is a prospective customer who you might later paste into the Customer Database

Similar to invoices, contacts in the Primary Contact Manager can be pasted directly to the Customer Database.

When pasting to the Customer Database, the important fields in the Contact Manager are colored in Blue, Green and Brown. The Blue fields paste to the name and address fields in the Customer Database. The Green fields paste to the "Attention" and "Other ID" field. Note that Attention and Other ID fields don't show on the Main Invoice Screen, but once in the Customer Database, they are available to appear on the printed invoice. AnyOrder looks up the customer in the Customer Database and extracts the Attention and Other ID field for inclusion the printed invoice.

To paste a contact, start in the Customer Database (MAIN TASKS >> CUSTOMER NUMBERS AND ADDESSES). Create a new customer if you haven't already. Then select EDIT >> PASTE FROM PRIMARY CONTACT MANAGER. A list of your contacts appears. Select the correct contact, and their name and address will be pasted in place.

3. The business or individual is a prospective customer who you might later paste into the Customer Database

As mentioned above, contacts in the Primary Contact Manager can be pasted directly to the Customer Database.

To review: When pasting to the Customer Database, the important fields in the Contact Manager are colored in Blue, Green and Brown. The Blue fields paste to the name and address fields in the Customer Database. The Green fields paste to the "Attention" and "Other ID" field.

The brown fields are pasted to the Customer Contact Manager. Remember, the Customer Contact Manager (which is different than the Primary Contact Manager), is linked with the Customer Database. When you move a contact from the Primary Database to the Customer Database, data is moved into Customer's contact manager at the same time. The fields moved into the contact manager are indicated in brown. (Just about all the brown fields go to the contact manager. The only exception is User Defined Fields 1 and 2 -- which are indicated in brown too. They go to the main customer database rather than the contact manager.)

4. The individual is someone who you plan to contact again and you wish to have AnyOrder remind you to do so

You may also use the contact manager to schedule follow-up tasks with the individual. For example, let's say you a setting up arrangements with a new shipping company which will result in a considerable saving for your business. You've made one initial contact, but you need to make a second contact -- and you want to keep track of it. The purple fields are used for this purpose.

Using the example above, you would begin by typing a short reminder note to yourself in the "Next Step to Take". For instance, you might type in "Need to contact to finalize new shipping arrangements."

Next, indicate when you want to be reminded. That's done by indicating the date in: Take Next Step By Date.

Once this information is entered, you can move it to AnyOrder's Scheduler. To do so, click on the "Add This Step to the Scheduler." That brings up the Scheduler and the information is placed in the cue. On the date that you've indicted, AnyOrder will display the reminder message upon program start-up.

5. Extra fields - these fields are used in the contact manager only and are not used elsewhere in the program

Three additional fields are are used only in the contact manager. These include User Field3, Last Contact Date and Previous Result. They not utilized in any of the other databases found in AnyOrder. More Information below.

Salutation Field. The salutation field doesn't transfer to any other databases, but it is useful for a couple of purposes. It is beneficial if there's a possibility that you might mistake the gender of one or more of your contacts. It's also useful if you do a mail merge with contact data and you wish to include a salutation. (To move the contact into a spreadsheet for mail merge purposes, use FILE >> FORMAT & PRINT FROM SPREADSHEET).

Email. Two buttons are found to the right of the "Email" field. The first button will activate an external email program. To use this, you'll need a non-web based email program such as Thunderbird or Outlook. The second button "Open" is available with Level 7 programs. It activates theInternal Email Client with the person name and email address in place. You can, then, compose a message and send it directly from within AnyOrder without going through an external email program. If you haven't already, you will need to configure the program for your email server.

User Field 1 and User Field 2. These fields are designed to align with the same fields in the Customer Database. Thus, if you paste a contact into the Customer Database, they paste appropriately into User Field 1 and User Field 2.

User Field. This an additional field in the Primary Contact Manager that you can use for your own purposes. It does not paste into any other database field.

Last Contact Date. Use this if you previously made a contact with this individual, and you'd like to keep track of when the contact was made. This field is often used in combination with the "Previous Result" field (below).

Take Next Step By. If you plan to do some follow-up work with the individual, indicate when you'd like to do it. Once you indicate a date, you can use AnyOrder's Scheduler to display a reminder message when the date comes around.

Next Step to Take. This works in conjunction with "Take Next Step By." With certain individuals, you may wish follow-up an initial contact. Type in a brief reminder message, explaining how you'd like to follow-up. Once you enter a reminder message, you can click on "Add This Step to the Scheduler." That places the message in the Scheduler's cue, and you'll be reminded of the task when the program starts on the designated date.

Previous Result. Use this when you've done some follow-up work with the individual and you'd like to indicate how things turned out. For example, you might type in: "Jane was busy when I called, but remains interested and would like to discuss it later."

Button: Move to Notes. If you have made several contacts with an individual, you can keep a record of the steps taken and the results by use of this button. It clears the "Next Step" and "Previous Result" fields and moves the information into the Notes area where it is saved.

The Primary Contact Manager has a full compliment of search features . They are easily accessed by clicking on the "Search" or "Look-up" buttons.

By using the menu at the top of the screen, you'll find a number of useful options:

•	Changing the Order. You can change the order in which the contact records are displayed by: Name, Contact, State/Province/City, or by Category. The order is changed in the TOOLS Menu.

•	Copy and Pasting from the Clipboard. You can copy an entire address to the clipboard and insert it in a word processing program or other software (EDIT Menu). You can paste an entire copied address to the contact manager (EDIT menu).

•	Importing Contacts. You can import data into the contact manager (FILE menu). For more information on this feature, see Importing Contacts.

•	Deleting Contacts. You can delete one or more contacts by selecting from the EDIT menu.

•	Accessing the Scheduler. You can access the Scheduler or add steps to the Scheduler by selecting from the TOOLS menu.

•	Viewing or Printing Contacts from a Spreadsheet. You can move the data from the Contact Manager to a spreadsheet program (FILE menu). Once in the spreadsheet, you can sort, format and/or print it.