Manage contacts in Business Central to keep track of the key people linked to your customers, vendors, and bank accounts – all inside your ERP.
Business Central includes a contacts system that goes beyond a simple address book. You can manage contacts linked to customers, vendors, bank accounts, and employees. Each contact can be a company or a person. Furthermore, person contacts can link to a company contact. This gives a clear view of who works where inside each company you deal with. In short, each team can find the right person without leaving BC.
What Are Contacts in Business Central?
There are two contact types in BC: company contacts and person contacts. A company contact maps to a business record such as a customer or vendor. A person contact maps to someone who works at that company. The two are linked in the system, so every person belongs to a company.
When you create a customer in Business Central, BC creates a company contact for that customer. This contact appears on the customer card in the Contacts section. The company contact shows in bold and is the main link to the customer record. Below it, you can add as many person contacts as you need. Each person gets their own unique contact ID. Consequently, you can track several contacts at the same company without mixing them up. Moreover, the same setup works for vendors and bank accounts – not just customers.
Contacts linked to employees let you store details for your own staff inside BC. This is useful if you want to keep a record of who handles specific tasks or accounts internally. Bank account contacts work in a similar way – you can track who to call at a bank when you need help with a payment or account. Thus, the contacts system in BC covers all the key people your business works with, not just those at customer companies.
How to Manage Contacts in BC
You can manage contacts from the customer or vendor card, or from the main Contacts list. Search for Contacts in the BC search bar to open the full list. Here you see every contact in the system across all linked record types. The list shows the contact type for each record – customer, vendor, or bank account. Furthermore, you can filter by type to focus on a specific group.
Opening a contact card shows you the full detail for that record. For a company contact, you see the linked customer or vendor number. For a person contact, you see the company they belong to. Both types show address, phone, email, and any other details you have added. Indeed, the contact card is the single place to view and update all data for that record. In short, it keeps all contact data in one spot and ties it to the right business record.
Moving a Contact Between Companies
One useful feature when you manage contacts in BC is the ability to move a person contact from one company to another. If a key contact at a customer moves to a new company that is also in your BC system, you can update the link on the contact card. BC keeps all the history tied to that person. Consequently, you do not lose any past activity when the contact changes employer. Moreover, this means your contact data stays useful over time as people move between companies.
Adding Job Roles to a Contact
Job responsibilities let you tag a person contact with the areas they handle inside their company. Open a person contact card and assign one or more roles to that record. For example, a contact might be tagged as responsible for accounts payable and marketing. Therefore, when you need to reach the accounts payable team at a customer, you can filter contacts by that role and find the right person fast.
This is useful for larger customers or vendors where many people handle different parts of the business. Instead of keeping a list of who does what outside BC, you store it on the contact record. Furthermore, job roles are easy to filter. In short, they turn your contact list from a simple list into a working reference for your team. Additionally, because the data is in BC, it is always up to date alongside the rest of your records.
You can set up as many job responsibility types as you need. BC comes with a default list, but you can add your own to match your business. For instance, a company that works with large retail chains might add roles like buyer, logistics planner, and store manager. Then, the sales team can filter contacts by role across all customers at once. Overall, this makes it faster to target outreach and avoids the need to search through long contact lists by hand.
Using Profiles to Manage Contacts in More Detail
Profile questionnaires let you add extra detail to a contact. You set up a list of questions and answer options in BC. Then, you fill in the answers for each contact. The question set is fully under your control. You can add questions about interests, business focus, or anything else useful for your work. Consequently, you can build a profile for each contact that goes beyond the standard fields.
The profile answers appear on the contact card in the Profile Questionnaires section. They are also searchable. For example, you could find all contacts at customers who have shown interest in a certain product area. Furthermore, profile questionnaires are not limited to sales use. Any team that needs extra data on their contacts can use this feature. In addition, the setup is flexible enough to cover very different needs across the same BC system.
One point worth noting is that you can use contact data – job roles, profile answers, linked company, and relation type – as filter criteria for reports or mail merge tasks. Thus, the contacts system gives you a way to reach the right people based on what you know about them. Indeed, this is the basis for any targeted outreach you want to run directly from BC.
Wrapping Up: How to Manage Contacts in Business Central
Business Central gives you a built-in way to manage contacts linked to all your key business records. You can track company contacts and person contacts, assign job roles, and build profiles. Each contact stays linked to the customer, vendor, or bank account it belongs to. Thus, all your contact data lives inside the same system you use for daily work.
This is a useful feature for any business that wants to track the right people at each company without setting up a separate CRM tool. NAV SEAL will cover more contact setups in follow-up videos. Check the NAV SEAL YouTube channel and visit navseal.com for more Business Central guides.
For more Business Central guides and tutorials, visit NAV SEAL Blog and watch more videos on our YouTube Channel.
