Configuring lookup tables is one of the first tasks during a new installation and one of the most important that you will do on your Enterprise 6 system. Basically lookup tables allow you to enter various codes to classify and analyse your data. As such, it is advisable to think carefully about how you intend to use the codes that form the basis of each table.

Viewing and reporting
If you intend to use the codes to analyse data for the purposes of viewing or reporting, then you should try to have a very structured approach to codes. Always have coding structures that move from the general to the specific.

So, for instance, all Status codes relating to prospects might begin with P; the second digit might indicate the size of company; and the final one might indicate the year that they were added to your marketing database. So "P14" might mean "very important prospect added to the database in 2004".

When reporting you can report on all codes starting with P, all those starting with P1, or just on P14 alone; and you can subtotal, average, and so on, each category.

Another example of structured codes would be where you intend to use Analysis codes to report on a group of companies, which also have divisions, and different strands of business within each division. Using a structured system of Analysis codes would enable you to report on each individual strand of business. The first character would represent the company, the second the division and the third the type of business, and you could do reports - a Profit and Loss statement, for instance - for each level.

Highly structured codes are excellent for getting management information out of the system, and the structures should reflect the way you want to analyse data. They do though have the disadvantage of not being intuitive and so more difficult for users to remember or guess at, and if you are going to allow users to create new ones when they need to, then they will almost certainly forget what the structure is. So you have to balance out these two considerations.