Accounts
Group contacts, deals, and activity under companies.
Accounts represent companies or organizations. Use accounts when several contacts, deals, projects, invoices, or tickets belong to the same customer.
Good account structure makes CRM reporting, support history, and finance review much easier. Poor account hygiene creates duplicate companies and scattered customer context.
Use accounts as the company-level source of truth. Contacts explain people, deals explain opportunities, tickets explain support work, and invoices explain billing. The account ties those records together.
When to Use an Account
Create an account for a company, client organization, vendor, partner, or any business entity that should group multiple records. A solo customer can stay as a contact only if there is no company relationship to track.
Use accounts when reporting, ownership, billing, or support history needs to be understood at the company level. This is especially useful for agencies, consultants, B2B sales teams, and service businesses with multiple contacts at one client.
Create the account before importing or adding many contacts for the same company. It is easier to link records correctly at creation than to clean them up later.
Account Detail
The account detail page should help you understand the relationship at a company level. Use it to review contacts, notes, activity, tasks, deals, and related records.
Before calling or emailing a company, open the account detail page and check the latest notes, linked contacts, open deals, unresolved tickets, and unpaid finance records. This prevents teams from working from only one contact's view.
Good Account Hygiene
- Use a consistent company name.
- Link contacts to the right account.
- Keep account owner and custom fields current.
- Review duplicates after importing data.
Avoid Duplicates
Agree on naming rules before importing or creating accounts. For example, use the legal or customer-facing company name, avoid abbreviations unless the company uses them publicly, and keep domains or locations in custom fields instead of creating duplicate account names.
If duplicates exist, decide which account should remain active before adding new deals or invoices.
When cleanup is needed, pause new activity on duplicate accounts until contacts, deals, tickets, and finance records are linked to the right account.
Account Fields To Keep Current
Review the account owner, industry, lifecycle status, website, billing details, custom fields, and important notes. These fields help routing, reporting, segmentation, and customer handoff.
If your team uses account-level ownership, update the owner before creating follow-up tasks or assigning new deals. Otherwise work can go to the wrong person even when the contact is correct.
Account Review Routine
Review high-value accounts regularly. Check owner, linked contacts, open deals, unresolved tickets, unpaid invoices, notes, and recent activity before important customer conversations.
Add a task when the account review creates follow-up work. Notes explain what you learned; tasks make sure someone acts on it.
Troubleshooting
If activity is split across duplicate accounts, choose a primary account and clean up links before creating more records.
If a contact does not appear on an account, open the contact and confirm its account relationship.
Before Imports
Before importing accounts, normalize company names, domains, owners, and custom fields. Import a small sample first and confirm contacts link to the expected accounts. Then import the full file after duplicate handling looks right.