Map

The map, under Map in the sidebar, plots your records geographically so you can work by area rather than by list.

It is useful for the questions a list cannot answer: who else is near the customer you are visiting on Thursday, which parts of a region you have barely sold into, and how to plan a day of visits without criss-crossing a county.

It plots what has an address. Records with no address, or an address too vague to place, do not appear — so a thin-looking map is usually an address-quality problem rather than a coverage problem. Worth checking before drawing conclusions about a region.

Selecting an area. You can draw a shape on the map to select everything inside it, which is how a geographic question turns into an actual list of records you can work through. See "Build a calling list from the map".

Where the address comes from. Records are placed on the address held against them. If your company treats the customer's address as the place work happens, that is what you see; if a sale can happen somewhere other than the customer's registered address, the map shows the registered one unless the record itself carries the other.

For a geographic breakdown as numbers rather than pins — how much per region — use a report grouped by a region or postcode field.