Thanks, this solves our problem of importing customers.

When are you expecting 2.4 final, just a WAG is fine. Just trying to anticipate.

ok, thanks that tells it all.  I was just not sure if FA used the uniqueness or not.

ed

itronics wrote:

FA customers table also use unique numeric IDs, so you can safely import customers with the same names, and then in case of ambiguity change 'Short Name' for duplicated records adding some informative suffix (e.g. address fragment)

Janusz

Hi Janusz:

When I tried to insert a duplicated name, I got:
#1062 - Duplicate entry 'anewcustomer' for key 'name'

I am back to the original problem of how to handle duplicate names.  Our customer list is fairly large-around 70k- so we have many duplicate names,  perhaps 75 or 100  of some names. There are around 7k total duplicated name so doing this manually is not a task I would look forward to.

Am I missing something obvious for a solution?

After we get the old customers into the database, then it will be easier to import new ones from our shopping cart.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ed

It is, thanks

ed

ok, then i will proceed and see where the next problem might be.

When using the search for customers, is it possible to easily change the order of the search result?

Thanks for the quick replies.

ed

Janusz:

When a new customer is entered the record is given a unique number in field 'RecordID' so that the customer name is just another field with no special properties. When a sales order is entered and I start typing a name it shows all the names that fit what i type and narrows as i type. If there are 10 joe smiths then I have to pick the right one which is easy as also displayed on the SO form is the associated address and other info.  BTW, is it possible to have the same action in FA?

I will look closely at how oscommerce data is imported.

Thanks for quick reply

ed

My company is planning to move from MYOB to Frontaccounting.  We have thousands of duplicate names since MYOB indexes differently.  What is the best way to migrate our customers to Frontaccounting?

Also we plan to use our php/mysql shopping cart to drive new customers into Frontaccounting so how do we avoid duplicate names in doing that?

Thanks, ed