Author Topic: Use relationships or a custom field? (Read 459 times)

The Boojum · December 02, 2010, 03:21:44 pm

The majority (but not all) of my clients are children who take classes with us. However I wish my actual contact to be with their parent/s.

As I can work out, I either

create 2 contacts for each - a child and their parent - and define the relationship and put them in a household
or I add a 'parent' name as a custom field, and make all billing and contact details refer to this field

The first option seems a bit redundant as I am creating two records for each client. The second I assume will involve editing templates which instills fear in a noob, but with some help, I am sure I can manage.

Any advice from people who have dealt with a similar issue?

Dave Greenberg · December 02, 2010, 05:38:17 pm

It depends what types of interactions you have / need to track between your organization and parents, and between your org and children (clients). Other folks using CiviCRM for schools typically record both parents and children. You might want to read some of the blogs / threads on the CiviSchool project.

If you really don't want to keep records for the parents, you could store the parent's email in the child's record, and store Parent Name as custom field. Then you might want to modify the default token patterns for Postal Greeting, Email Greeting and Addressee to use the custom parent name field (so emails, mailing labels etc. use that name).

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Author Topic: Use relationships or a custom field? (Read 459 times)

The Boojum

Use relationships or a custom field?

Dave Greenberg

Re: Use relationships or a custom field?