New Company

Company records are a central part of itris. Creating accurate and complete records is essential for getting the most out of the available functionality.

Record Management
Recruitment Workflow
Nancy Cusack itris Expert
Ian Farrow itris Expert

Starting Points & General Information

There are a number of places from which you can start creating a company record.

  1. You can choose to open the new company form using the option in the Main Menu.
  2. You can create new companies via the New Record Hub, accessed via the Navigation bar (see the Record Hub article).
  3. When in the process of creating any new record you can click the plus icon in the top right.
  4. From a relevant email in the inbox, you can choose to create a new record (see below).

There are three mandatory fields when creating a company record as shown below, however, you can stipulate additional fields to be mandatory in the itris Management Utility (IMU), please see the Settings | Mandatory Data article for more information.

  • Company Name
  • Either Address, Postal Code or Address Location
  • Sector

Creating the record

When you have entered all the mandatory details and any additional information you will be able to create your company record. If any fields require validation, or mandatory fields have not been completed the Validation (exclamation mark) icon will show.

If itris recognises any potential duplicates it will let you know. See the section below for duplicates.

Creating a Company record from email

When adding a company record from an email, you will get an additional tab in the creation window called Email, from here you can drag and drop (or copy and paste) data into the new company window. This will be useful if the company has included any information you wish to use or reference when creating their record, such as their address or switchboard number.

Website

Unless disabled in your itris Preferences (see the itris Preferences article for more information), once you’ve added a company name itris will run a google search for that company. You can then view their website, twitter account, LinkedIn account etc and use any relevant information to complete the company record. For example, you can drag over their company logo to be their itris profile picture, drag and drop (or copy and paste) the ‘about us’ information into the Summary tab or simply cross-reference their address.

Profile Picture

You can store a profile picture, normally a logo, against your company records in itris. As mentioned above you can copy this from their website, Twitter or LinkedIn, additionally, if you have one on file you can upload it. If you don’t have a picture/logo to use for your company the picture profile area will display their first initial. The colour of the circle will be linked to the Status assigned to the company. See the article Data | List Items for more information.

Details

There are a plethora of data fields available in the details area, much of which can be used for searching, such as address, industry, company size etc.

You can add your company to one or more groups, including your favourites, link the record to their parent company (as long as that record exists in itris), select the company status (list item) and set the sector.

Locations

You will need to enter details in at least one of the location fields (Address, Postal Code, Location), you don’t have to add all three. If you add more than one of these three, it will accumulate them into the same address details on the saved record. All three pieces of data are also searchable. Once the record has been created you can also add additional addresses.

See the Location Assignment article for more information.

Communications

When adding in the email and telephone numbers note the drop down lists which enable you to specify which type of email/phone number you are adding. These lists are specified by you in the IMU, see the article Data | Communications for more information. The default type pre-set for each can also be adjusted in the IMU, see the related article Settings | General Settings.

Once the record is created you can add further communications, see the Communication Assignment article for more information.

Industry & Business Type

Industries and Business Types can be created in the itris Management Utility (IMU) within the Data area, please see the Data | Industries article for more information.

Having this information on a company record can very useful for organisation of data and assist with searching. You may wish to search all companies on your database that are within the Travel Services Business Type under the Leisure & Hospitality Industry, by being able to search this within itris, it can potentially aid you in generating further business in that industry.

Recruits for

The Recruits For list is used to categorise jobs, for example jobs such as Brand Journalist, Blogger, Column Journalist, Photo Editor etc, might be categorised as the job function Journalism. You can then indicate which categories of jobs the company you are adding might have. If you have a long list you can use the filter at the top by typing what you are looking for.

The Recruits For list references the Job Functions list which is created in the IMU, see the article Data | List Items.

Consent

The defaults for Marketing Preferences are set in the IMU Settings | Communications area, however you can change what is assigned at the point of creating a new company record as well as once they are created.

What is set on a company sets the default marketing preferences for contacts that will be created under that company. Setting the marketing preferences at company level is very similar to the settings for applicants or contacts, however instead of setting a specific expiry date for opt in/out you set a number of months in the future (as an expiry date would soon pass).

For more information on Consent, please see the article Marketing Preferences (Consent).

Keywords

Keywords are used simply to identify a specific record, for example, you may use keywords to note specific skills or attributes associated with the work taking place at a company. These can then be searched on, providing the facility to find records tagged with the applicable keywords.

The creation and management of keywords occurs in the IMU, as this will allow you to centrally control the keyword data in itris.

See the Keywords Assignment article for more information on manually assigning keywords, ratings and Lifetimes/Obtained on.

Custom Fields

A Custom Field is a custom piece of data defined by your organisation to cater for data that itris does not accommodate.

Custom Fields allows you to customise itris to work alongside your business and workflow, additionally, they are searchable fields.

Custom fields are created and managed via the itris Management Utility (IMU) Data area.

Please see the Custom Field Assignment article for more information.

Assignees

Assignees are used to associate a user or users with a record as either an Owner, Watcher or FAO (for the attention of), and are searchable. See the Assignees article for more information.

Summary

The summary area is a blank canvas where you can make notes about the company, often the ‘about us’ content from the company’s website is added here.

It doesn’t have to be one long text stream, you will see that you have lots of formatting options too.

This is also a searchable area, so if you later remember you made a particular note about a company, but just can’t remember which, you can run a Full Text (Boolean) search of the summary area for each record type.

Duplicate Records

In databases, it is inevitable that somebody will try to create a duplicate record. To avoid this possibility, when adding an company record the following fields will be used to check for duplicate records

  • Company Name including Known As names
  • Web Address
  • Email Address
  • Business Phone

When adding in a possible duplicate record the duplicate button at the foot of the window will become active and detail the number of possible duplicate records the record being created matches. Once clicked on the possible duplicates semi-modal will open, listing any possible duplicates on the left with their record card on the right to help you determine if it is a duplicate. Using Go To will take you to the possible duplicate record, asking you first if you wish to discard the new company entry.

If you close the duplicate semi-modal the Possible Duplicates button will remain at the foot of the window. You can return to the duplicate semi-modal any time by clicking this option. If you choose to register the record you will be asked to confirm it is not a duplicate before continuing.