CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm importing a database where organizations and individuals need to share a custom field for query purposes. I don't want people within our organization to have to do complex queries. I want them to pull up one query that searches for that field in both organization and individual. Having organizations and individuals separately also prevent easy addition of a custom field because the custom field has to be added twice.

My solution as of now has been to create a person named "Representative of" and then create a relationship to the organization or even a custom field for the organization name. How can I make individuals and organizations essentially the same?

For my uses, I'd really prefer to import all organizations and individuals together. I run into the problem when I am missing first and last name for the organizations. Could there be a way to add an organization field for individuals, make first and last name not required, and just not have to deal with the organization type of contact?

Thanks

Jake - Why not just create a Custom Data Set with "Used For" = Contacts (rather than Individual or Organization). This way the custom field(s) in that set are available and searchable for both Individuals and Organizations.

You can perform such a search from Adv Search.

You can also save such a search as a Smart Group - then your non-techs just need to look in that group.