Account Types and Teamwork

Client Minder is particularly strong when it comes to teamwork. This page describes how it all works and what the various account options are.

Single User Account

As the name implies, this type of account is intended for a single user working alone. Normally, such a user is not part of a team and therefore all records are private to the individual concerned. Nevertheless, the user can still share any particular record with any other Client Minder user, by naming the other user in one of the "Shared" boxes. Each record can be made available to up to six other users in this way. This is intended to to allow the user to provide details of a client to say a subcontractor.

Corporate User Accounts

In a corporate user environment, each user is part of a team, and may in fact be part of several teams. When a user creates a new record for a new prospect or client, the user can allocate the record to any of the teams of which he or she is part. If the user is only part of a single team, then the allocation is automatically made to the single team concerned.

Corporate user accounts have one or more sales manager review accounts associated with them, which allow a sales manager to see all the records of everyone in the team. For example, a company might have 10 salesmen, each of which has a Client Minder account. The salesmen typically would be required to keep the information up to date and might choose to do so using a PDA from the car, immediately after leaving a prospect's or client's premises. The sales manager can log in at any time and see the up-to-date information for each member of the team.

Sometimes, a corporate user might be part of several teams. For example, a company might represent several manufacturers and have salesmen mainly specialising in one manufacturer, but with some overlap. The ones that handle two or more product ranges can be in two or more teams. The sales manager of each team can review only those records allocated to his or her team.

Corporate users can optionally be allowed to have "Private" records (as in single user accounts). In this case, the user can choose whether to allocate a new record to the team (or one of the teams) or to keep it private. Private records are not visible in any review accounts.

Multi-Team Sales Manager Review Accounts

Multi-team review accounts allow a higher level sales manager to review the records belonging to several teams. There might, for example, be several teams located in different countries, each with a local sales manager, who has a review account that allows him or her to see all the records of the people in his local team (but not any in other team). At corporate headquarters, there might be a sales director, responsible for one continent. A multi-team review account would allow him or her to see all the records from each of the local teams for which he or she is responsible.

In addition, an even higher person in the organisation can have a multi-team review account to allow him or her to see all the records worldwide, throughout the organisation.

Mix and Match - any way you want!

Normally, the team boundaries follow natural departmental boundaries and the review accounts fit the departments naturally too. But any combination of grouping can be achieved to cater for unusual structures. An example of an unusual case, that Client Minder can cope with, might be a person who works part time for two unconnected companies that both use Client Minder. The person would belong to teams in each company and simply allocate each record to the appropriate one. Neither company would have any visibility of the other.

If you have an unusual structural requirement, ask us!

Access Rights

Each client record has a designated "Account Manager", which is usually the person that created the account originally. The account manager has full access to the record and can read it, alter it and delete it. If the account manager chooses to share it with another user, then that user too gains full access rights and can also read it and alter it, but may not actually delete it. If a person attempts to delete a record that has been shared with them by another user, then the action taken on clicking on "delete" is to cancel the sharing facility. A user may also "clone" an account that has been shared with them. This simply makes a private copy under their own name.

All review accounts are read-only, so a sales manager, using a review account can only look at the records of the team members.