Household/workplace Automatic Linking

[biologyben]

When importing files (or through the contact record) the system should have 'smarter' linking abilities between households & occupants as well as employers/employees in simple circumstances.  This would obviously need to have some settings to accommodate various use cases, but for instance, I would expect the following:

If I choose to use households and I set up a person at a home address, a household should be created with that address as the master address location and named via rules that were created.  Similarly, the home phone number of the household should show in all household contact records as home phone (and vice versa).  If two individuals are imported to the database with the same address, perhaps they should even be merged automatically into a household and named via the naming rules (Last name only if they match and hyphenated names if they do not match, etc)

If an organization is set up and I create a new individual and link that person as an employee of the organization, then the employee should inherit the organization contact information as 'work' address and phone.  These field obviously may need further editing so that phone extensions or department name/address changes can be made, but for the majority of our needs, this would be a great start.

Ideally household contact preferences should also propagate to individuals initially - when the household is marked 'do not send mail' for instance, then the individuals should gain these settings at the home address as well.

I suppose in my implementation, I see households especially as a container for similar information for the household members and it is frustrating that this information is not then linked to the occupants. 

[Erik Hommel]

Some sensible suggestions for improvement. Do you or does your organization have the ability to contribute these improvements?

[biologyben]

Of course not - That would be too easy!  (or we'd pay someone to do this for us)

I'm the director of a small afterschool program which just two years ago didn't even have a website.  I'm bringing them into the 21st century (complete with credit processing soon!) but it is a slow road.

Due to costs, we are attempting to use CiviCRM instead of DonorPerfect Online (that would be in the range of $600 annually).  So pinching pennies is an understatement at this point.  Of course, if this system helps increase our donor base & interactions without significant added overhead on data input and management costs, then I think we'd be more able to pay back to the cause.  But fronting that cost is simply not possible for us. 

I'd estimate the cost of such coding would be rather costly if it is implemented in any form that isn't just a hack that would just work for us.

Now, my brother does quite a bit of work on database integrations & design for his company & I might be able to rope him into looking at things, but I'm still evaluating our biggest concern(s) with the system before I ask him to get involved.