Finding a company on the web

Type a customer’s or supplier’s name or website in the Find box at the top of the form; what the web knows is proposed beside the fields, each value with where it came from — and written by nobody but you.

The first thing on a New customer, New supplier or any other form a lookup can help with is a Find on the web box. Type the company’s name — or its website — there and press Find (or Enter). What comes back is a list of proposals: the name, website, legal name, registered address, city, state, postal code, country, telephone, industry, head count, founding year and a short description — each with where it came from and how sure it is.

1. Open New on Customers (CRM › Accounts) or Suppliers (Supply Chain).
2. Type the name, or the website, in Find on the web at the top, and press Find.
3. Read the proposals. Each says "From Wikidata" or "From the company website" — click it to see the source.
4. Use it on the ones that are right, or Accept all; then correct anything and Save.

You do not have to press Find: on a New form, typing a name or website into the form’s own Name or Website field and pausing for a moment looks it up by itself, and the proposals appear under "Found on the web for…". If nothing is found, nothing is shown.

What it will not propose

• A field you have already filled in. Your typing wins over a guess, always.
• Anything the form does not have. A proposal is checked against the form’s own fields, so a lookup cannot introduce a column.
• A choice that is not on offer. A value for a list has to be one of its values.
• Credit limits, prices, discounts, rates, payment terms, tax identifiers or anything else that is a decision rather than a fact. A confident-sounding number in a money field is the one kind of wrong that costs money.

Where the values come from

• The company’s own website: the address, telephone, e-mail and legal name most sites publish for search engines. Marked high confidence — it is the company’s own word.
• Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia: official website, country, headquarters city, industry, employees, founding year. Marked medium.
• A name alone is enough. For a company too small for Wikidata, the name is tried as a web address (V3iT → v3it.com, .ai, .in and the other common endings), and a site is used only if its own page names that company. Values found that way are marked medium and say "found by trying the name as a web address — check it is the right company", because another company can own a similar name.
• Your company’s AI engine, if one is configured, for what the web did not answer — told what the web said, and never above medium.

It works with no AI engine at all. A small company with no public presence may simply not be found; the panel says so, and you type it as before. Every lookup is recorded in the audit trail with what was proposed and the sources it used, so "where did that address come from" is answerable later.

Settings and permissions

• Platform settings › Lookups: "Look companies up on the web" (on by default) and "Offer what the web knows as soon as a name is typed" (on by default). Switch either off for the whole company.
• A lookup fills a form, so whoever may add or change records on that screen may run it; anybody else is refused. It writes nothing itself.
• Only public web addresses are ever fetched; an internal or private address typed in the box is refused.