Similar problem had here.

We would set up a contact with the legal name as the contact and the aka in brackets so in my daughters case Charlotte would be set up as Charlotte (Charlie) etc etc.

This helps us to navigate both (and comes up on searches). We do use the known by category, but it was recently highlighted to me that this is ok for individuals but doesn’t have this facility on a Ltd company (I’m sure someone will correct me if this is wrong). We ask the team to check the client tasks when emailing out to clients and manually change this in the emails, then it’s set on the client task going forward!

And by the way, my daughter (aged 11) is having difficulty the other way round at school as she has to log in as Charlotte, and her teachers forget that she has a legal name and can’t find her on their mailing list either - so this issue isn’t restrict to accountants! 

@Coral Thank you.  We were thinking that using the ( ) would help for the aka name.  For some though it will make the work name really long!  But alas, you can’t win them all right!!

@kylenecarse no you can’t win them all.

Which is the bigger battle, having a long job name, or team members having to think and remember the difference between legal names and aka’s?

Solid point @Coral !!

Team ease for the win!

I’m a stickler for the legal names, so in Karbon we have people and organizations set up with their legal names.

We use preferred names, which is good client task emails that get sent out. I like the idea of putting the preferred name in brackets. I might add that to my process.

For companies with DBAs, I put their full name: Fancy Company DBA Basic Company

Never heard of DBA, is that doing business as? Like “trading as” in Australia.

Yes, exactly.

1. The problem with using the brackets in a name field means that the data in last (or first) name is muddled and you cant use it as part of the automated email tasks. In order for you to get around that, do you use the preferred name field only to use the automations?
2. How do you handle organisations with trading as names (ie sole traders or companies with different names)?
3. Does anyone link their proposal or accounts software to Karbon for contacts either directly or using Zapier?  All my programs seem to be linked by contact name and they need to be exact in order to be linked, which causes additional problems when we are using the contact information in Karbon liberally

My feedback from Karbon was to use the preferred names but they are not searchable when looking for a contact.  So in a database with 350+ client names, it seems an unscalable task to remember all the nuances.