Accounts

Accounts represent organisations you interact with in Administrate. These can include customers, prospects, suppliers, or any other organisation you track. Any organisation known to your business is treated as an Account.

Table of contents

• Terminology
• View Accounts
• Create an Account
• Edit an Account
• Delete an Account
• Reporting
• Account Hierarchies
• Potential Duplicate Accounts
• Audit
• Training Tokens
  • Overview
  • Balance
  • Transaction History
• Venues
• Further Configuration

Terminology

View Accounts

Navigate to CRM → Accounts or use the search icon to find Accounts.

The Account screen consolidates:

• Account details
• Contacts
• Bookings
• Tasks and documents
• Purchased events, split into Registrations and Private Events subtabs. The Private Events grid lists each event’s dates, Personnel, Location and status alongside its invoice and revenue.
• Financial records

Create an Account

1. Search for the Account name first.
2. If no match exists, click Create New Account.
3. Complete the form and click Save.

Tip: Always search first to avoid duplicates. See Potential Duplicate Accounts for how Administrate spots them.

Edit an Account

1. Search and open the Account.
2. Click Edit Account.
3. Update fields and click Save.

Delete an Account

1. Open the Account.
2. Select Edit → Options → Delete.
3. Confirm deletion.

Important: Accounts with dependencies cannot be deleted.

Reporting

• Custom Reports
• Accounts by Industry
• Accounts by Owner
• Clients by Country

Account Hierarchies

Use hierarchies to represent parent-child relationships between organisations.

1. Open the child Account.
2. Edit and set the Parent.
3. Save.

If you merge an Account that has children, its live child Accounts, with their subtrees, move under the surviving Account. The one exception is a hierarchy whose parent Accounts already form a loop, where a child can be left with no parent. See Merging Accounts.

Potential Duplicate Accounts

Administrate finds Accounts that may be the same organisation by comparing email address, VAT number, website and name. Contacts have their own tool, described in Potential Duplicates.

On an Account: when the possible-duplicates warning is enabled for your instance and an organisation Account (not an individual) has possible duplicates, a banner reads This account has N possible duplicates. It names up to five of them and counts the rest. If you can merge, each suggested Account has a Review link to the Merge Account screen, where you can merge the Accounts or mark them Not a Duplicate.

The Potential Duplicate Accounts page has two tabs:

• Potential Duplicates lists groups of Accounts found with the same detection the banner uses. The header shows how many groups there are, how many are marked not duplicates, and how many groups each kind of match found (Same Email, Same VAT Number, Same Website, Similar Name); a group matched two ways counts under both. Each row lists the group’s Accounts, its size, how its Accounts matched and its Strength: Strong when they share an email address, VAT number or website, so they are very likely the same organisation, or Name Only when they share only a similar name, which is a starting point rather than a finding. Names are similar when they start with the same word and the full names are close once punctuation and endings such as Ltd are ignored: the same words, one extra word on the end (unless names for several different organisations extend the same name, as with a brand’s divisions), a small spelling difference or another ending of the same word in one word (Survey and Survay, Traders and Trading), or the same name with a different code on the end. Names that share only their first word are not matched, except that when more than 5,000 Accounts share a first word, or rarely when their names would take too long to compare, they are listed together as one group. Sort by selecting a column heading; hover over a column heading and select its filter icon to filter by Account name, match reason or strength. Review opens the Merge Account screen with the group’s oldest pair still to review, the older Account preselected as the one to keep; you can change that, or choose any other Account in the group there. After a merge started from the list, you return to it.
• Merge Log lists every merge of Accounts you can see, newest first: When, the Account that was Merged and Deleted, the Account that was Kept (linked), and By whom, with a View Audit link to the kept Account’s Audit tab. Sort and filter by any of these the same way, including a date range for When.

Not a Duplicate: when two suggested Accounts are different organisations, select Review for that pair on the banner or Potential Duplicates list, then select Not a Duplicate on the review screen. A confirmation names both Accounts before you dismiss the pair. The pair is no longer suggested together: it leaves the banner, the Merge Account suggestions and the list. In a group of three or more, only that pair is dismissed and the group stays listed for the rest; a group drops out of the list once every pair in it is dismissed. Both Accounts’ Audit tabs record the change as Not a duplicate of the other Account. To undo it, select Show Groups Marked Not Duplicates on the Potential Duplicates tab and use Mark as Duplicate Again on the group. Marking a pair needs edit permission for both Accounts. When an Account is merged away or deleted, its dismissed pairs are removed with it.

See Merging Accounts for how to merge, and why a merge can be refused.

Audit

The Audit tab on an Account shows its history, newest first:

• Account rows for changes to the Account’s record. A row says whether the Account was created, updated or deleted, and the Details show each field’s old and new value. Changes saved together, custom fields included, appear as one row.
• Contact rows, for an individual Account, for changes to the person’s own record.
• Task rows for tasks created, changed or deleted against the Account.
• Resource changes: Document links and unlinks, Pricing Agreement and Price changes, Projects created, edited or deleted (name, dates, currency, region, status and notes), external ID changes and Not a duplicate of changes appear as Account rows, grouped by what they changed. Edits to a Document’s own record are not listed here. Each change is recorded as it is committed, so a change already committed stays listed even if a later step of the same operation fails. Recording is best effort: if the history write fails after the data was saved, that change can be missing.
• Account merges, recorded against the surviving Account and showing the merged-from Account ID. See Review a merge in the Account Audit tab.

Each row shows When, Type, User and Details. Select a row to open a details window with the recorded before and after values, who made the change and when. You can filter by Type and search or filter User and Details. An organisation’s Contacts keep their history on their own pages.

Access is all-or-nothing, as for the Event audit tab: anyone who can open an Account’s history sees every entry and every value on it, within the Account and Contact company scoping of their role.

Opening a merged and deleted Account’s URL redirects to the surviving Account.

Training Tokens

Training Tokens are pre-paid credits that can be redeemed for training later.

Balance

Each token issue appears as a separate row. Tokens with the earliest expiry are used first.

Transaction History

• Buy – Tokens issued
• Redeem – Tokens used
• Refund – Tokens returned
• Adjust – Manual changes
• Expired – Tokens forfeited

Venues

Accounts can represent venues such as hotels or training locations.

1. Mark the Account as a venue.
2. Add locations under the Events tab.
3. Assign venues to Events.

Further Configuration

• Custom Fields
• Employee Sizes