Areas in SIGNZ perform two functions:

- a searchable location for Sites

- a searchable location for Customers and Owners (both stored as Companies)

Using areas for Sites:

An area is defined by three pieces of information:

- Major region
- Minor region
- Area name

The area name could be a suburb, town or a portion of a city.  When planning areas for Sites the most critical part is the Avails system and how areas relate to the site searches.  Another critical piece is the public web site (if you have one) as it may use a similar search mechanism.

As you can see from the screen shots below we have defined an area called 'Auckland East' which is in a minor region of Auckland, part of the North Island of New Zealand.

This structure allows you to search for many combinations of sites such as: - Auckland East - Auckland sites - North Island and ... everywhere.  For more details on Avails see here.

The general recommendation when creating your areas is to keep the number of areas to a small but useful size per minor region.  There is little point having many areas with 1 or 2 sites in each as that will make Avails searches too difficult.  Likewise there is little point having just a few areas with 20 or 30 sites in each as then finding a site that may suit a local customer may be difficult.  Perhaps we aim for areas that may have 5 to 10 sites.  This may mean breaking a small town or city into CBD, East, West etc. instead of their individual suburb names. 

The use of Major and Minor regions helps combine areas into more meaningful groups to allow us to search by region instead of area.  We can, of course, tick multiple areas such as East and CBD if that gives a better result than the Auckland region.

Areas and regions form a very handy part of the Sales Analysis system.

Using areas for Companies - both customers and property owners:

Areas are linked to each company for mail merge and reporting use.  They have no other real purpose in SIGNZ but ARE required before you can create a company.

Options exist to create areas that can be used only for companies, sites or both.

Areas can be created via Sites and Companies but cannot be changed within this screen.  Areas can be updated via the Table Editor tool.

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