Migrating ACT! Companies

ACT! Companies vs. Company Name Field

The ACT! Company is probably one of the worst implemented concept of ACT!   Instead of a clearly defined relationship between a Contact and an Account/Company, ACT! allows the user to enter text and/or relate the record to a Company using the same field - Company Name in the Contact record.   If text is entered, the Contact isn't "technically" related to the Company.   To increase the confusion, the Contact can be also assigned to a Company by using dynamic Rules or manually assigning on the Company tab.  Contacts can also be assigned to multiple Companies without any hint as to which one is the primary Company.  The end result -- a very, very messy Contact/Company relationship.

Exported Accounts

In most CRM software, Contacts MUST be associated with an Account.  Since ACT! doesn't require this, the Exporter software attempts to collect unassigned Contacts, create an Account and assign the Contacts to the Account.  The created Accounts.csv is different than original Company.csv file which also extracted.   Unless, there are compelling reasons to use the Company.csv data, it is recommended that it be used for reference only and ignored for the migration.

How the Exporter software creates Accounts

Unfortunately, the Exporter software can't interpret the "intentions" of the user.  It has to follow some simple rules when building Accounts.  These are listed below.

• If a contact belongs to an ACT! Company, the account information for that contact will be taken from the ACT! Company data.  The UniqueID for the Company will be placed in the AccountID field in the Contact.csv.  For the ZOHO and Salesforce extracts, this will begin with the letter X
• If the contact does not belong to an ACT! Company and the Company Name is present in the contact's record, then this company name will be used to create the Account.  All contacts with the same Company Name will be assigned to the created Account.  The AccountID for the Account will be created by the Exporter.  For ZOHO and Salesforce extracts, this will begin with the letter A.  There are additional controls for building the Accounts available in the Custom Control tab. 
• If the contact does not belong to an ACT! Company and does not have a company name in the record, the contact will be assigned to an Account named Not Given.  

Contacts assigned to multiple Companies

Most CRMs do not allow Contacts to be assigned to multiple Accounts.  ACT! does.  If this feature has been used, the Exporter software creates a column in the Contact.csv  export file named X_Other_Companies.  This field will contain a list of all the Companies that the Contact was assigned to.  How it is dealt with in the new CRM will depend on the features available.