Contacts overview
Case management involves dealing with people outside your business. These people are called contacts in Case Manager. They are stored in the Company List and connected with a case at its Contacts tab, see Company List for details.
A case's Contacts tab displays all of these people who are involved in this case. It enables quick access to them and their details, including their role(s) in the case.
All contacts connected to a case, including the client, are members of the Company List 'master list'. Thus, when a new person, who is already in your system as a contact, needs to be connected to a case, you don't need to re-enter their contact information again to do so. You simply connect them.
In general, contact information details are shared between the Company List and individual cases, so that an update in one place (e.g. a new phone number) updates the information in the other place, with some exceptions, see Sharing contact information. This is regulated by Contacts system settings and, of course, by security group permissions. This system maintains easily accessible, up to date contact details
The sharing of information also means that you should make any changes to contacts carefully, distinguishing between changes that apply to this contact only and changes that apply system-wide.
For example, if you want to change a certain contact for a case, e.g. the Bill To, you cannot just enter a new name in the existing Bill To contact (if permitted) because this simply renames the contact here and everywhere else it appears in the system, see Change contact details at a case.