Hi

With so many mergers in the industries we serve, our accounts are frequently changing names.  We have set up a system for making referrals, but are curious to get ideas on how others deal with this issue.  When Company A changes names to Company B this is what we do:

1. Rename the Account Company A to Company B

2. Add a history note about the name change

3. Create a new account with the name Company A. 

4. Set the "Division" to "SEE: Company B". (This way we can see it is a referral when looking up the old account in the Lookup window.)

5. Set the Account Type to "Referral" (This filter keeps it from cluttering reports and groups)

6. In the Account Associations tab - set up an association labeled "Name Change"  so we can easily jump from the referral to the current account.

This seems to work ok for us, though as companies go through multiple name changes we have to go back and clean up referrals to referrals.   Probably after a certain amount of time the referral could be deleted.   It is also common that the name change is slow on the part of the company so some contacts may call us using the new name, while others call using the old one so it is necessary to have something to help us remember. 

My question is how others are dealing with this?  Do you have similar systems?  What do you do differently?

 Thanks for your suggestions!

Kim