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FrontAccounting forum → Accounts Receivable → best way to avoid duplicate customer names?
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
How do you differentiate various customers with the same name?
Also please look into download area. There is some extension modules to support migration form other systems.
Janusz
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
FrontAccounting is a web application. It means we have take into account responsiveness of various servers which is not always the best, so we decided not to implement autosugest.
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
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
Yes, if you are familiar with php. See customer_list() function in includes/ui/ui_lists.inc.
It should be selfexplanatory.
Janusz
It is, thanks
ed
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
Well, if this is only technical problem on import you can simply remove the 'unique' modifier of name key on debtors_master table with phpmyadmin. FA does not rely on this, but on debtor_no uniqueness.
Janusz
ok, thanks that tells it all. I was just not sure if FA used the uniqueness or not.
ed
Additionally since next release (2.3 final) uniqueness in debtors_master table has been moved from name to debtor_ref field (which is used in customers list). The previous situation should be considered as db design issue. Thank for pointing this out 
.
Janusz
Thanks, this solves our problem of importing customers.
When are you expecting 2.4 final, just a WAG is fine. Just trying to anticipate.
It depends on testing efforts on 2.3RC1 done by FA community. So far most effective debugging was done between beta and RC on every release, however this time (i.e. during 2.3 deployment) we have not especially strong support from testers. Therefore the cleaning process for final version can take some time. Roughly estimate for now is October or even November.
Janusz
that time frame is just fine with me, not an any hurry. We are testing 2.3rc from Sep 7. It is installed on a LTSP Ubuntu server.
I still have some problems with getting customers into FA. Making names non-unique helps alot but I can't come up with a way to ensure that debtor_ref would be unique. If we make debtor_ref part of the name, then I don't see what we can append to that to get uniqueness other than just adding some incrementing number. That would not be of any help for the person inputting data as it would give them no clue to which customer they are looking at. Moreover when importing from a shopping cart we would have to somehow test to see if the debtor_ref is in FA and the seems it could be messy.
When entering a sale, picking out which customer to use based just on debtor_ref seems a bit hard to do because we might have 25 or more debtor_ref that are the same except for something at the end which keeps them unique.
I am not sure I have explained well what I see at a problem. May be that I am missing something.
Thanks for all you quick replies.
FrontAccounting forum → Accounts Receivable → best way to avoid duplicate customer names?
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