Understanding the Account & Contacts Hierarchy

Understanding the Accounts & Buildings Contact Hierarchy

Inspect Point offers a lot of features related to contacts, such as: viewing and assigning your contact’s roles, assigning them to a building or account, and managing your sales team.

Because these tools are valuable to your business, it’s important to understand the various screens and actions associated with contacts. To this point, we will be following a single contact, Griffin, as we navigate through Inspect Point on all the pages our contact hierarchy impacts. 

The Contact Hierarchy

To begin, we’ll look at the Contacts page. On this screen, we see the contact’s name and job title, account, contact information, customer portal status, and lastly their buildings and roles. 

In our example below, looking at the Buildings column on the right, we can see that Griffin belongs to the account, Griffin Fire Protection. We know this because the account name is bold, and it matches the name listed in the Accounts column. 

Underneath Griffin Fire Protection, we see several arrows connected to buildings. This means these buildings - Cabellas, Dougan Lane LLC, etc. - are associated with the account, Griffin Fire Protection.

Clicking “Show more” expands the dropdown to show the rest of the buildings associated with Griffin Fire Protection. 

The icons next to each building and indicate the roles Griffin has at each location. 

Important: If contact roles are set at the account level, these roles will transfer to each building associated with that account. We can see this with our contact, Griffin. At the account level, Griffin is listed as the Report and Backflow Contact. 

When we hit close, we see these two icons appear for all the buildings under the account, Griffin Fire Protection, indicating that Griffin is now the Report and Backflow Contact at each building.

Note: If a contact role was set at the account level, you cannot remove that specific role at the building level. In other words, if we wanted to remove Griffin as the Report Contact at Cabellas, we would have to remove him as the Report Contact at the account, Griffin Fire Protection. Doing this would also remove Griffin as the Report Contact from every building under Griffin Fire Protection.

You may also set additional contact roles for buildings that were not set at the account level. We see this in the building, Freeman Sporting Goods, where Griffin - in addition to being the Report and Backflow Contact set at the account level - is also the Proposal contact. 

To summarize: roles set at the account level are inherited at each building linked to that account. You may add additional roles at each building, but may only delete inherited roles at the account level. 

For more information on managing your contact roles, click here.

Contact Details

Clicking on a contact’s name will bring you to their contact details. Here you’ll see the associated account and a list of buildings the contact is listed at. You can manage the roles in the same way we’ve previously discussed. 

You also have the ability to add a new building from this screen. To do so, use the “Add” button. 

New buildings will appear at the bottom of the page, as they are not linked to an account. You may now add contact roles to this building. 

Account Details

To access account details, either click the account name from the contact details screen or with the Accounts tab on the left of the screen.

Here you can see all of the contacts associated with this account. You can add or remove contact roles in the manner explained above. 

You may also add new contacts to this account, and subsequently manage their roles as well.

You also have the ability to set your Sales Team from this page by clicking on the “Sales Team” tab on the Account Details page. 

Users added here will appear in the Sales Team for each building the account is associated with. 

The icon next to the user’s name indicates whether the user is the default salesperson or not. Clicking it will either make the user the new default salesperson (if it wasn’t clicked already), or remove default status. 

New users can be added to the Sales Team here as well. 

Building Details

If we click on Freeman Sporting Goods in the example above, we are brought to the building’s details. You can access this page through the Buildings page on the left side of the screen as well. 

Clicking on the “Contacts” tab on the building details page, we can see all the contacts associated with this building.

Here, we can see all the roles for each contact. Ones that are bolded are set at the building level, and can be changed. Ones that are grayed out are inherited from the account, and can only be changed at the account level. Hovering over one of these gray icons will display a message indicating it’s an inherited role.

You may also add contacts to the building from this page. To learn how to add a contact to Inspect Point, click here.

You can also view your Sales Team at the building level from this page.

Hovering over the icon next to the contact’s name shows whether they are the default salesperson or not. Again, this is set at the account level. 

Proposal Hierarchy

Contact roles also come into play when creating proposals.

On proposals, the default contact is the proposal contact from the building. If no proposal contact is set at the building, it will fall back to the account. 

From our example above, we made Griffin the proposal contact for Griffin Fire Protection. Now, when we make a proposal for the building Freeman Sporting Goods, he will be listed as the default contact. This is because there was no proposal contact set at the building level, so it defaulted to the account. 

You may also select additional contacts you’d like the proposal to be sent to. To do this, simply check off the boxes next to “Proposal Contacts.” 

Invoice Hierarchy

Invoice logic works much in the same way as proposals. 

If creating an invoice from a building, the billing info will populate from the Billing/Invoice contact role at the building level. We see this in the example below with Griffin at Freeman Sporting Goods. 

If no Billing/Invoice role was set at the building level, the billing info will pull from the account. If no role was set at the account level, the billing info will populate from the account’s billing address, as seen below. 

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