Chapter 2: Contact Data

Summary

How you manage and maintain contact data of clients in your practice management system has far reaching affects. It is important to understand the impact this data has on your clients and their experience when interacting with Aiwyn. 

This article focuses on the Aiwyn functions related to contact data and provides guidance and best practices regarding how you manage and maintain this data in your practice management system.

Included in this article:

• Client contacts and their functions
• Client contact management suggestions
• Client contact fields in Aiwyn

Client contacts and their functions

Most practice management systems integrated with Aiwyn have built in functionality to create a contact record and associate that contact record to one or many client records in the system. Each time you create a new contact and it is associated with a client in your system, Aiwyn picks this up and creates a linkage on our side between that contact and that client - this is the client contact.

Practice management systems that lack contact to client capability tend to instead have "client billing email" field(s) in use on the client record itself. Unlike a true "contact" record, a client billing email is typically a single field on the client record intended to capture one or more email addresses, and usually there are no "name" fields available to capture the person's name in relation to that specific email address field.

Because of this, Aiwyn must create a client contact using the client record name as the "full name" of the client contact, tied to the client billing email entered on the client record.

Either way, when a client contact is created or edited in your system, important information from the contact record enables certain Aiwyn functions to possibly occur:

• Client contact enabled/disabled to receive Aiwyn invoice emails
  • Directly affects firms who do not use mail rule to route Aiwyn invoice emails, such as firms on CCH Axcess. If you send an invoice email directly to your firm's Aiwyn inbound email address, we will lookup all the client contacts of that client and send the Aiwyn invoice email to those enabled for invoice emails.
  • If you use a mail rule to route Aiwyn invoice emails (most firms) then Aiwyn will respect any recipient you sent the invoice email to.
• Client Contact enabled/disabled to receive Aiwyn smart statement emails
  • Affects all firms.
  • Aiwyn will lookup all the client contacts of a client with AR that has aged enough to meet your collection triggers, and will send the smart statement email to those enabled to receive Aiwyn statement emails. 
• Client portal user automatic account linkage when same contact email is used for multiple clients
• Client contact designated as primary contact for an Engagement Letter
• Client contact designated as billing contact for an Engagement Letter
• Contact removed from client in practice management system -> Aiwyn's "client contact" linkage is inactivated and contact not associated with client in Aiwyn database
  • This ensures the contact does not receive invoices/statements from Aiwyn for that particular client entity they are no longer associated with.
  • This does not remove the client entity from the corresponding client portal user (if one exists). Click here for the steps to remove a client entity from a client portal user.

Client contact management suggestions

The following are suggestions for managing client contacts in a way that works best for ensuring a seamless Aiwyn experience:

• One unique email address per contact
  • Do not use additional email fields to capture a different email address on the same contact record
  • Do not enter two email addresses within a single email field - doing so will cause automatic client account linkage to not work, as well as make the contact not available to receive an Aiwyn generated Engagement letter
• Contact record (if available in your system) includes the contact's real first and last name associated to the contact's email address
• If your system does not allow the same contact to be shared across multiple clients:
  • Using the same first Name, last Name, and email address for the same person who is a client contact for many client entities in your system will help ensure the automated account linkage happens if/when that person creates an Aiwyn client portal user.
• Fill in contact type or category as accurately for that contact as you are able. Define what each contact type selection in the list means to your firm - and add in additional selections if possible to provide greater detail and depth. 
  • While this contact type or category selection likely does not impact the contact's ability to receive invoices or statements via Aiwyn, it will impact Aiwyn Engagement Letters. Arbitrarily assigning a contact type to contacts in your system can impact your firm's ability to interpret who these contacts are and the role(s) they fulfill for clients.
  • If you are taking the time to clean up client contact data in your practice management system because of your firm's implementation of Aiwyn Payments & Collections, it is worth it for you to classify/categorizing the contacts in relation to the client(s) as part of your update efforts.

The way in which contact data is managed and structured varies significantly between the different practice management systems integrated with Aiwyn. As such, while this broadly defines methods and best practices, your specific system's standard field mapping and necessary contact data structure is defined in the standard fields chapter of this user guide.

Client contact fields in Aiwyn