Companies
- Every Contact record in MinistryPlatform is designated as an Individual or a Company. You typically add Companies to track donations in the Platform.
- Company records don't have a gender, marital status, first name, nickname, or other individual-specific fields. These fields are hidden when you select a Company as the record type.
- Company records should have a Household record, which stores their address and home phone. The Household Name is the Company Name.
- Use the Combine Contacts Tool to combine Companies.
- There isn't an overriding reason to "clean up" or remove Companies from MinistryPlatform, but there is a good reason to keep them: they probably have historical donations associated with their Donor records. If you find some Companies in your database that you need to remove, use the Combine Contacts Tool to combine them into the *Unassigned Contact Record. If you are not confident using this tool, speak with your SPoC.
- To inactivate Company Contact records that have not given and have no other activity, set their Contact Status to Inactive.
Create Company Records
Use the Add/Edit Company Tool to create or edit Company records.
The Company Name of a DBA ("Doing Business As") Contact record should be the same as what prints on the donation, for example, "Smith Consulting." You can edit the address record to add "Attn: John Smith" in Address Line 1 and list the physical street address in Address Line 2.
Find Company Records
- Contacts page: Change your view to All Records or Current Companies to return Company records in the search results. The default view (All Individuals) does not return Company records.
- Participants page: Company records should never display on the Participants page because Companies should not have Participant records.
- Donation-related pages/applications: The Donors page of the Platform shows Company records in default view. The Batch Manager Tool also returns Companies in the search results.
- Applications that only deal with people: Applications like Check-In Suite do not return Company records in search results.
Link Companies with Contacts
If a Contact owns a Company, you can go to the individual's Contact record and create a Business Owner Of relationship on the Relationships Sub-Page. Sound like a good idea? The following view displays all Companies without relationships so you can add them! (Just be sure to change the Last Donation dates.)
Contacts.[Company_Name]AS[Company Name],
Contacts.[Company]AS[Company],
Donor_Record_Table.[_Last_Donation_Date]AS[Last Donation Date]Contacts.[Company]= 1 AND Donor_Record_Table.[_Last_Donation_Date] BETWEEN '2020-01-01 00:00:00' AND '2020-12-31 00:00:00' AND Relationship_ID_Table.[Relationship_ID] IS NULL
AND not exists (select 1 from contact_relationships cr where cr.contacts.contact_id)Linking Company Donations to a Donor
If a Company gives a Donation, you can apply soft credit to that Donation Distribution to link the Donation Distribution to a Donor. For example, the "Christian Community Foundation" may make many Donations on behalf of many Donors. There should only be one Christian Community Foundation record. The Soft Credit link ensures a record exists that links each Donation to the Donor who initiated it. Donations only display on the statement for Christian Community Foundation, but there are various internal MinistryPlatform reports that can include soft credit donations.
If a Company gives a Donation to meet part of an individual's Pledge, you can distribute that Donation to the Pledge of the other Donor. This third-party pledge gift diminishes the Pledge's balance, but it only displays on the Company's contribution statement.