Contacts for Accounts Receivable in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Have you ever had a Customer that has multiple contacts to maintain? Perhaps their Purchasing department cannot help determine when their Accounting department will be sending payment to you for outstanding orders. Maybe you want to keep track of who their Salespeople are for targeted sales campaigns of products they purchase from you. NAV makes it easy to keep records of multiple people within a company to allow more efficient communication with your Customers.

Let’s start with creating a Contact directly from the Customer Card. Below, you can see the Address & Contact Fast Tab of the Customer Card. I’ve entered all the information for the Company contact.

Clicking on the Primary Contact Code drop down box will open up the Contact created for this Customer. As you can see, there is only one Contact at this time, with the company name listed as the name.

If I drill down into the Contact, I can see that this Contact is identified as a Company. All Customers will have a Company Contact associated with them. This allows for easy grouping and filtering in the Contact List by Company. You can also see here that the contact information entered in the information in the Address & Contact Fast Tab has been transferred to this Contact Card. Here, you can also identify the default Correspondence Type for this Company (Hard Copy, Email, Fax).

If we look at the Contact Statistics FactBox, we can also see information related specifically to this Contact. At this point, all we have right now is the Business Relations, created at the time of the new Customer Creation.

The type of Contact that you set as the Primary Contact will depend on your business needs. For this example, we’ll assume the main contact for our Customer is the Accounting department. We want to make sure we get our payments in a timely manner! To do so, a Contact Card needs to be made for our main Contact in that department. Click on Home \ New to begin this process.

First, change the Type on the General tab from Company to Person. This will ensure that we can connect this Person to our Company Contact.

Complete the remaining fields for your Contact. By clicking on the ellipses next to the Name Field, you can include a Salutation, Job Title and Initials as well as the Contact’s full name. Click OK to return to the General Tab.

In the Company field, click the drop down box to navigate to the Company Contact to associate to this Person.

The details from the Company Contact will default into the Communication Tab. Update any of the fields necessary for the Person, like the Phone No., Mobile Phone No., Fax no., Email, and / Correspondence Type.

Once the Person Contact has been created, click OK to return back to the Contact List for the Customer. Highlight the Contact to be associated with the Customer and click OK.

The Customer Card has now been updated with our Person Contact.

In addition to creating Contacts for your Customers, you can associate Contacts with Vendors and Banks. Additionally, you can create Contacts that are not associated with any of those Master Records. Consider the possibility of tracking Contacts your Salespeople meet on the road or at trade shows, potential Customers. This summer, I’ll begin a series on Contacts and how they can be used in the sales cycle to track potential customers, including quoting, opportunities, interactions and even sales campaigns.