Record Relationships Overview

Building relationships between records can help streamline communication between different departments in your agency. The possible relationships between records are best understood by thinking of them in terms of parent, child, or sibling relationships. Child and grandchild records branch from parent records and grandparent records. When a parent record has child records associated it, the relationships between child records are ‘sibling relationships.’

There are two basic approaches to establishing relationships:

• You can select another record as its parent or child when you open a record

• You can clone a record to create one or more new parent and new child records.

Both approaches enable you to transfer contact, payment, and even document data from one record to the other without changing existing relationships.

In addition to the parent and child hierarchical organizations of records, you can select several related records and create sets for batch processing. For example, you can create a set of related records that share the same workflow, and then batch process the workflow task status update for the set.

If the relationship between two records turns out to be inappropriate, you can remove the relationship.