Corelating Contacts and Addresses during Customer Import

ERPNext
1

I’m working on importing Customers, Contacts and Addresses, but I have one major hurdle I haven’t been able to figure out: how to corelate the three together.

Here’s my current methodology:

  1. Import Customers.

    • This way I can attach Contacts and Addresses to existing Customers
    • My idea was to use the ID column in the import template to assign IDs. If I know the IDs during import, I can use them later as link names when linking Contacts and Addresses.

  2. Import Contacts and Addresses

    • I don’t think the order matters.
    • Again, my idea was to use the ID column from the Customers as the Link Name under the reference section.

This plan revolved around being able to assign IDs to customers. However, after importing customers, I can see that the system appears to have ignored the IDs I generated and assigned it’s own IDs to my Customers. When I try to import Customers and Addresses using the Link Names I have, I get a series of failures with the message "
Could not find Row #1: Link Name: "; if it doesn’t fail then it is probably attaching it to the wrong Customer.

My problem appears to be similar to this problem, which does not appear to have been answered.

Is there a (recommended) way to import these without manually corelating them later? When you have 60,000+ records, the task of doing this manually is error prone and time consuming, which makes it a very bad transition plan.

2

You should change the setting below before importing the records (Change it to “Customer Name”).

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3

Can you explain? How will that change the way that ERPNext invents the names rather than using the ones I assign, or are you suggesting something different entierly?

We have a LOT of duplicate names, and I can easily see the system creating Jim Smith, Jim Smith-1, and Jim Smith-2 differently than my import expects.

In practice, I may need to switch to something entirely different anyway, since in our current environment we use the format ‘G######’.

4

If you do not want to use the default ERPNext option of naming series, then you can name your customers by Customer Name (which you would need to ensure is unique). This works fine in a B2B case.

In case you are a B2C business, then you can probably maintain mappings in excel and upload them one time for data conversion using the naming series generated by ERPNext.

5

I don’t think understood you properly - it sounded like you suggested uploading each customer separately?

Thanks for the help, btw. If we can find a workaround that works, that’s fine, although I’m still wondering why ERPNext ignores my generated ID (even though it’s in the proper format).

6

I’m still hoping for a workable solution from the community for the customer import problem!

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