Having visibility of all data pertinent to a contact is essential in making informed decisions about their housing needs and also to ensure the most effective ongoing support. It is important to recognise that a contact will not interact with the housing organisation in isolation but will rather have other associated contacts that need to be taken into consideration. For example, a tenant will commonly have other family and extended family members that live at the same address and who share the same asset. These should all be recorded as Associates of the contact. Similarly, repair requests may be raised on behalf of the contact by another person, whether that be a relative or someone else fulfilling a role of responsibility (e.g. sheltered housing officer).
The procedure to link associates to a contact is as follows:
- Using the global search facility, type in the first few characters of the contact
1.
- Double-click on the row containing the exact record match. Where the expected record is not listed, a more advanced search can be conducted using the spy-glass icon (
).
- Click on Contact Details. The Contact Details window is displayed for the current contact.
- Click on Associate. The Associate tab is activated.
- Click on New Associate. The Search Contact window is displayed 2.
- Enter sufficient contact details into the search fields provided and click on Search. The Select Contact window is displayed, returning all possible matches.
- Double-click on the row containing the exact record match or use Refine Search to enter alternative criteria. The New Associate window is displayed, populated with the chosen contact.
- Using the Associate type drop-down field, select the relationship parameter that is appropriate for the linked contact e.g. Carer, Relative, Social Worker, etc.
- Use the Comments field to add any contextual data that is relevant to this associate record.
- Choose an Effective from date for this associate record i.e. the date on which the link came into effect 3.
- Choose an Effective to date if the associate record needs to be reviewed on a specific date or to capture a change of circumstances; a blank fields means the link will be continually valid.
- Click on Confirm. The new entry is displayed in the Associates summary table.
- Click on Save.
Note
1 The search facility will automatically return all possible matches for both first name and last name once the Number of characters before an automatic search commences system preference is reached.
2 The Select Contact search facility is used to locate the associated contact.
3 The Effective from date defaults to the current system date and cannot be left blank.
See related topics...
Contacts record maintenance overview
To create a new contact
Using the search facility
