Accounts

Overview

Sugar's Accounts module consists of companies with whom your organization has a relationship. It is generally seen as the hub for managing and analyzing your business' interactions with each company. Each account record may then relate to other Sugar records such as contacts, meetings, cases, opportunities, and many others as your relationship with the customer matures. This documentation will cover information and actions specific to the Accounts module. For instructions concerning views and actions which are common across most Sugar modules, such as creating, editing, and deleting accounts, please refer to the Working With Sugar Modules section of this page.

Please note that you will only be able to see account records as allowed by your team membership, user access type, and assigned roles. For more information on teams and roles, please refer to the Team Management and Role Management documentation in the Administration Guide.

Account Fields

The Accounts module contains a number of stock fields that come out-of-the-box with Sugar. For information on using and editing various field types, refer to the User Interface documentation. The definitions below are suggested meanings for the fields, but the fields can be leveraged differently to best meet your organization's needs. Administrators or users with developer-level role access have the ability to alter, add, or remove fields via Admin > Studio. For more information on configuring fields, please refer to the Studio documentation in the Administration Guide.

Escalations and Accounts

The Escalations module is used to track the escalation of a specific record, such as an account. Use the Escalate option in the account's record view Actions menu to create an escalation for the account. As long as the account has at least one open escalation in its Escalations subpanel, the Escalated field is displayed as a red badge with the text "Escalated" at the top of record view and the preview. It can also be displayed in the Record View dashlet and list view.

In addition to the Escalations subpanel, the Accounts module has a second subpanel containing escalation records, called "Other Related Escalations"; these two subpanels are used to represent two different relationships between an account and an escalation. The Escalations subpanel contains all escalations with the Related To field set to the currently viewed account (i.e., a one-to-many relationship), whereas the Other Related Escalations subpanel contains all escalations with this account in their Accounts subpanel (i.e., a many-to-many relationship).

The following example illustrates the use of the one-to-many and many-to-many escalation relationships: an account may be escalated because the account is at risk of terminating its contract. At the same time, the account may be invested or interested in the escalation of a particular bug that has greatly impacted its users. The account-at-risk escalation would be displayed in the Escalations subpanel because the account itself is escalated. The bug escalation would be displayed in the Other Related Escalations subpanel because the account is not the record that is escalated, but it does need to be related to the bug escalation indirectly; this allows the person working on the bug escalation to be fully aware of how many customers are impacted and may require communication as progress is made.

While the Related Type field is not displayed by default in the Other Related Escalations subpanel, you can enable it using the three-dots menu on the right side to easily see and sort by the type of record that is escalated. See the Escalations page for more details on how escalations work.

Business Centers and Accounts

Emails and Accounts

Emails Subpanel

The Emails subpanel in the Accounts module displays emails that are associated with the account record in a variety of ways:

• Explicitly related to the account: If the account is selected in the email's Related To field, the email and account are explicitly related, and the email will appear in the account's Emails subpanel and History dashlet. Instructions for using this flex relate field are available in the Emails documentation.
• Implicitly related to the account: If one of the account's email addresses appears in the email's From, To, or Cc fields, the email and account are implicitly related, and the email will appear in the account's Emails subpanel and History dashlet. This implicit relationship is made for emails sent from Sugar as well as any email imported into Sugar via Inbound email accounts or email archiving.
• Related to the account's related contacts: If the email is related, either explicitly or implicitly, to a contact record that belongs to the account, the email will appear in the account's Emails subpanel and History dashlet.
  • Note: Administrators can enable or disable an account from displaying related contact emails via Admin > Related Contacts Emails. For more information, please refer to the Emails documentation in the Administration Guide.

For more information on working with subpanels, please refer to the User Interface documentation.

Working With Sugar Modules

While the Accounts module has some features that only apply to accounts, it also uses the Sidecar user interface that most Sugar modules are based on. The following sections detail menus, views, and actions common to Sidecar modules and contain links to additional information within the page or links to the User Interface documentation.

Account Menus

The Accounts module contains various options and functionality which are available via menus in the module tab, list view, and record view. The following sections present each menu and its options with links to more information about each option in the User Interface documentation or, for Accounts-specific functionality, within this page.

Module Tab Menus

Click the Accounts module tab in the navigation bar to access the Accounts list view. You may also click the three-dots menu in the Accounts module tab to display the Actions, Recently Viewed, and Favorites menus. The Actions menu allows you to perform important operations within the module. The Recently Viewed menu displays the list of accounts you most recently viewed. The Favorites menu displays the list of accounts you most recently marked as favorites. 

The module tab's Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations:

For more information on module tab menus including reasons a module may not be included in the menu, see the User Interface documentation.

List View Menus

The Accounts list view displays all account records and allows for searching and filtering to locate specific accounts. You can view the basic details of each record within the field columns of the list view or click an account's name to open the record view. To access a module's list view, simply click the module's tab in the navigation bar.

List View Mass Actions Menu

List View Record Actions Menu

The Record Actions menu to the far right of each record's row allows you to perform actions on the individual account directly from the list view.

The list view's Record Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations:

Record View Actions Menu

The Accounts record view displays a single account in full detail including its fields, subpanels of related records, and activity stream. To access an account's record view, simply click a hyperlinked account name from anywhere within Sugar. The record view's Actions menu appears on the top right of the page and allows you to perform various operations on the current record.

The Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations: 

Common Views and Actions

In the table below, the left column contains links to the User Interface page covering topics that are applicable to all Sidecar modules. The right column has links to sections of the current page that cover topics specific to accounts.