TEA is now Account Centric

TEA 10 now offers an Account Centric structure, which is used to facilitate the centralization of all activities related to a client.

An account defines a significant relationship with an individual or an organization. In TEA 10, all clients in your database have an account. The account may be specifically for a loan, grant, training, counseling, investment or any combination of the above. TEA 10 also provides the flexibility for end-users to create their own account types. Typically, account types are a concise representation of the primary services you offer, or of those you receive from other significant constituents or service providers.

Accounts are the central area from which you navigate to primary contacts and associated organizations, and where you manage all time related activities and tasks. Although activities can still be associated to a person, organization, loan, or any other object in the TEA database, they are centralized in the account module. Additionally, you can easily navigate from the account module to any ‘Financing Project’ (loan, grant) to view specific details on any financing instrument used for the Financing Project.

Flowchart of the Account Centric approach in TEA 10:

Benefits of Account Centric Systems
Although this method does require a little more data entry because of the separation between Persons, Organizations and Accounts, the overall benefits definitely outweigh the additional data requirements as illustrated below.

• Ability to manage both Individual, Business and Group lending
• Centralization for all Activity/Task Management
• Centralization for navigation and workflow in the database
• Centralization of all Clients (Loan, TA, Training, etc)
• Ability to identify primary contacts for mail-out and merge purposes
• Ability to relate multiple entities to a single account

For organizations that are familiar with TEA IX, many of the features between the two versions are quite similar, as both applications provide the separation of Persons and Businesses. With the implementation of the Account Centric structure in TEA 10, the aforementioned benefits will now be available to the end-users.

Although the structure is somewhat different than TEA IX users are accustomed to, the differences are managed by the incorporation of intuitive wizards that facilitate the setup of accounts and all associated records (Persons, Organizations, Loans, etc). The new wizards provide a simple linear process for creating any type of accounts and will continue to be the basis for record entry in all TEA 10 modules.