Managing Contact Details

Learning Team

Overview

Email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses can be added as Contact Point records within your Practifi organization. This article describes the tools available in Practifi for managing contact information across your Households, Organizations, and Individuals, helping you keep client details organized and easy to surface wherever you work in the system.

Occasionally, Practifi Administrators may need to edit or add data for this and other objects. For more information on how to handle bulk data operations, please review our Using Salesforce Inspector Reloaded and Using Data Upload Templates articles.

Managing Key Entities
Contact Points
Map to Record
- Custom Mapping Options
Standard Fields
Preferred Phone and Email Picklists
Store Record Updates as Contact Points
Mapping Custom Fields

Managing Key Entities

Practifi supports adding email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses as Contact Point records, allowing you to store as many of each as you need. The Map to Record field is used to sync Contact Points with a selection of standard fields on the Individual, such as Mobile Phone or Postal Address, making them more accessible in navigation, search, and other product areas, such as the Outlook and Gmail side panes.

Information can be added directly to standard fields on the Individual's record page, rather than creating Contact Point records, if only a small amount of information needs to be captured. Use the Preferred Phone picklist to determine which standard phone number stored on the Individual record (Home, Mobile, or Other) will be displayed alongside their name and other key details in places such as the Directory, so the most relevant number is always at hand.

Households and Organizations use the Preferred Phone and Email picklists to determine which standard phone numbers and email addresses to display alongside the Household or Organization name and other key details in places such as the Directory. Choose either to map contact details from the Primary Contact or capture them directly on the Household/Organization record's standard fields.

As of the Barolo release, Contact Points can be added to Households and Organizations on the Specifics tab to capture complex residency scenarios such as seasonal homes.

Contact Points

Because Contact Points are records themselves, they live in the Specifics section of the Contact's record page, where you can store as many as needed for each Contact, capturing the full range of ways a client may want to be reached.

Email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses each get their own section on the page [1].
A New Record button [2] appears for each section. When creating a new record, you can capture additional information in the Usage Type and Description fields to help differentiate between Contact Points.
The Edit and Delete actions [3] are located in the overflow menu each record has.

Map to Record

The Map to Record field is found on Contact Point records and displays a selection of standard fields from the Contact record, such as Mailing Address or Mobile Phone. Selecting one of these fields maps the Contact Point record to that field, so if you change the value in either place, the two stay in sync automatically.

Please note: Only one Contact Point can be mapped to a standard field at once. If you try to map a second Contact Point to a standard field that is already mapped, the existing mapping will be overwritten by the new one.

Contact Points are intended for additional information that is not needed daily. The Map to Record field should only be populated if there is a clear, specific use case.

Standard Fields

The fields shown on the chart below are the standard fields Practifi includes, which allow compatibility with features such as Map to Record, Preferred Phone, and Preferred Email. Standard fields can be populated either using the Map to Record feature or by entering contact details directly.

	Individuals	Households and organizations
Email	Email, Alternate Email	Email
Phone	Home Phone, Mobile Phone, and Other Phone	Phone
Address	Mailing Address, Other Address	Postal Address, Location Address

Please note: Alternate Email cannot be used to send emails when selecting an individual from within the email composer. Instead, you can click the email address from their record page to open the composer with the address pre-filled.

Preferred Phone and Email Picklists

The Preferred Phone and Preferred Email picklists are located on the record pages of all Households, Organizations, and Individuals. These picklist fields let you select the preferred value from the available options. Preferred email addresses and phone numbers appear in several places across the system, surfacing the right contact details wherever your team is working:

App pages such as Directory, Clients, Pipeline, & Influence
Within search results
The Household/Organization Members displayed in the Key Records tab as part of the Overview section on Household and Organization record pages
The Contact Details section in the side panel on Household and Organization record pages

Individuals can choose whether Home Phone, Mobile Phone, or Other Phone should be their preferred phone number. A picklist of email addresses is not provided, as the Alternate Email is assumed not to be preferred.

Households and Organizations can choose either to map a standard field from their nominated Primary Contact or to enter contact details into the fields directly, as per this table:

	Phone	Email
Maps the Phone or Email field to the Primary Contact field of the same name, meaning that if you change the value in one place or the other, the two continue to stay in sync.	Primary Contact Home, Primary Contact Mobile, and Primary Contact Other	Primary Contact Email
Enables the user to enter the value in the Phone or Email field manually.	Household Phone or Organization Phone	Household Email or Organization Email

Store Record Updates as Contact Points

You can manage current and historical addresses, emails, and phone numbers within Contact Points. When enabled, this feature automatically creates and updates Contact Point records based on changes made to Entities and Contacts, allowing you total flexibility in where you manage the data while retaining a comprehensive data set for reporting and updating details within workflows.

Because this enhancement creates many records as a by-product, which could cause some Practifi instances to reach their data storage limit, it is not enabled automatically.

To store contact details as Contact Points:

From Salesforce Setup, use the Quick Find field to search for Custom Metadata Types.
On the Custom Metadata Types page, click the Manage Records link next to Practifi Feature Settings.
On the Practifi Feature Settings page, click the Edit link.
In the Practifi Feature Settings Edit area, check the Store contact details as Contact Points box.
- Please note: Depending on your Practifi organization, this field may need to be manually added to the page layout to select this checkbox. Please consult the Adding Fields to the Page Layout section below for steps on adding this field to the page layout.
Select an option from the When a contact details field is updated picklist. See the table below for details.
- Please note: Depending on your Practifi organization, this field may need to be manually added to the page layout to select an option in this picklist. Please consult the Adding Fields to the Page Layout section below for steps on adding this field to the page layout.
Click Save.

Once enabled, the system will automatically create the additional records referred to above from your existing data if they don't already exist.

Please note: We recommend checking your Practifi instance's data storage usage immediately before and one or two hours after enabling the feature to assess the impact.

Adding Fields to the Page Layout

Depending on your Practifi organization, you may need to manually add fields to the Practifi Feature Settings page layout to use the Store contact details as Contact Points and the When a contact details field is updated fields. To add these fields to the page layout:

If not already in Salesforce Setup, click the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner and select Setup from the drop-down menu.
Use the Quick Find search bar on the left-hand side to search for Custom Metadata Types and select this option under the Custom Code menu.
Locate the Practifi Feature Settings custom metadata type on the table and click its hyperlinked label.
Scroll down to the Page Layouts section or click the Page Layouts hyperlink on the Practifi Feature Settings page.
Click the Edit button beside the Practifi Feature Settings Layout on the Page Layouts table.
Locate the Store contact details as Contact Points field in the Fields box or use the Quick Find search bar in the Fields box to search for this field.
Click and drag the field from the Fields box to within the Page Layout below.
Locate the When a contact details field is updated field in the Fields box, or use the Quick Find search bar in the Fields box to search for this field.
Click and drag the field from the Fields box to within the Page Layout below.
Click the Save button to finalize the changes to the page layout.

How It Works

How Contact Points are managed varies depending on the selection made within the When a contact details field is updated picklist. The details are explained in the following table:

Option	What Happens	When to Use
Create a new Contact Point, use active dates	A new Contact Point record is created with Active from date set to today's date and Map to Record set to the value of the updated field. The old Contact Point record's Active to date is set to today's date, and the Map to Record value is removed.	When you want to treat each value change as a change to a different address, email, or phone number, and treat the previous value as no longer active.
Create a new Contact Point, don't use active dates	A new Contact Point record is created, with Map to Record set to the updated field's value. The Map to Record value for the old Contact Point record is removed.	When you want to treat each value change as a change to a different address, email, or phone number, while keeping the previous value active.
Update the existing Contact Point	The value of the existing Contact Point record is updated. No new records are created.	When you want to treat each value change as a fix to the existing one, such as changing a misspelling. When you want to use as little data storage as possible, and/or don't want to store previous values as Contact Points.

Please note: Regardless of which setting you choose, there will be exceptions to the rule. To maintain a Contact Points data set that accurately reflects contact details, users will need to update it periodically.

Considerations

If enabling this feature causes your instance to reach the storage limit, consider either switching to the Update the existing Contact Point setting or deactivating the feature altogether.

If you do either of these, then you should also run a mass deletion of Contact Points to free up storage space and align your data model with go-forward behavior: either delete all Contact Points where Map to Record is blank if you switched settings, or delete all Contact Points if you deactivated the enhancement.

Mapping Custom Fields

If your Practifi instance uses custom fields, you can map them to the Preferred Phone picklist and Contact Points, extending the same syncing benefits to the fields specific to your firm's workflow.

Please note: The Preferred Phone picklist on Entity records is not included in this feature. Individual records use the Preferred Phone field on the Contact object, so they are eligible.

To enable compatibility for custom fields, add matching picklist values to the Preferred Phone field on the Contact object and the Map to Record field on the relevant Contact Point object. For a picklist value to match, its Value must be identical to the custom field's Label.

For example, if you added a custom field called Vacation Home Phone, then you would add a picklist value called Vacation Home Phone to the Preferred Phone picklist on Contact and the Map to Record picklist on Contact Point Phone.