What CRM shares with the rest of BMS
A CRM account and a billing customer look like two records for one company, and people reasonably ask which is the real one. Both are, and they are two views of the same underlying party.
One party, several roles
Underneath CRM, Service, Sales and Billing sits a single record for the organisation. CRM's account is that record wearing its sales-relationship face; the customer that Billing raises contracts against is the same record wearing its trading face.
Promoting an account to customer is not a copy. It changes what the company
is allowed to be to you — nothing is duplicated, and the history does not split.
This is why an account's address corrected in CRM is corrected everywhere, and
why a company on hold in the trading system shows as (On Hold) in lists across
the app.
The UI says so too
A customer record carries a Switch Module control, which opens the same company in another module:
| Switch to | Shows |
|---|---|
| Service | Jobs, assets and field activity |
| Stock | Supply orders and stock activity |
| CRM | The linked CRM account |
It is worth using rather than searching again in the other module. Searching finds a record that looks like the same company; switching guarantees it is, because it follows the link rather than the name.
What this means day to day
The CRM account keeps its history after conversion. Calls made while the company was a suspect stay on the account after they become a customer. The relationship record is continuous, which is the point of keeping it in one place.
Fleet data on the account is sales intelligence, not the asset register. The Products panel — brands, categories, models — records what a company is believed to have, including competitors' equipment. It is not the same as the assets Service maintains, which are machines you actually placed and support. An account can legitimately show products in CRM and no assets in Service.
Contacts can become portal users. A contact in CRM is a person at the company, and can be registered for portal access — the same person, given a way in, rather than a second account.
Where CRM stops
CRM tracks the pursuit. The moment a deal is won, the work moves to Sales as a deal with builds, and from there to Stock and Service. CRM keeps the relationship and the history; it does not carry the order.