Importing Account Information to D365 (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

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Posted on by barbieruelas

Hi everyone!

What are best practices when importing any D365 excel file exports that call for Account or Company Name? (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

I get many system errors related to duplicated or lookup references not getting resolved.

My understanding is that Account and Company Name must be an exact match to whatever is on CRM but this sometimes gets in the way when importing 2,000+ records.

Any advice or tips?

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Answers (1)

Phvl 50 on at

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RE: Importing Account Information to D365 (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

Hello,

My 5 cents. I think my situation was similar. I had a brand new environment and had to import : 1280 Contacts, 528 Companies and 280 'Deals'. It started with big frustration and zillion of errors.

1. I made 4 (!) csv files. Based on the templates I downloaded from each entity. (in 1st step I used only basic fields, for example for contact I started with only the first name, last name, account and email. Same basic set for Accounts.

The deals I had to split up : all that was 'very early stage I placed in Leads, everything from qualified and up I placed in Opportunity.

2. then i zipped the 4 files together. (yes 1 zip file) and uploaded this zip in the 'data import wizard'.

3. Seen I used the names 'Account.csv', 'Contact.csv', 'Opportunity.csv', 'Lead.csv', the system recognised the entities I tried to import.

4. When you use the exact same 'Display Names' as Column name, the system should also be able to find the match. I always checked all the exclamation marks and changed my csv file accordingly, and restarted the upload.

5. Once all was accepted without any error or unmatched field, I started adding some more fields and more completed records.

Once in a while I did the real import as well checking the errors and bulk deleted accordingly.

(to be completely honest, I wrote a Python script to transform from my source data files to my csv files, but I'm sure if you are somewhat handy with Excel this should work as well)

For more detailed info on how my data should look I used the documentation around API.

For example when you look at an account, you can find here exactly what are possible elements for a record : docs.microsoft.com/.../account

at this moment I have only 2 errors on 1280 contacts and 1 error on an opportunity, so I'm happy ;-)

Hope this helps,
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Wahaj Rashid 11,319 on at

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RE: Importing Account Information to D365 (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

I am afraid there is no out-of-the-box feature in Dynamics 365 that auto-creates an account (if not existing) while importing contacts.

However, here are couple of solutions:

If you know, which accounts to be created, Import Company data prior to Contact (or zip them together, based on the mapping D365 will first import parent file i.e. account).

Second option is to, create a custom field on contact called company name. While importing data, map company name to this custom field instead of Company lookup. Then create a flow (process) that triggers on creation of contact and gets account by company name, if it is there update the Company Lookup on contacts, if it does not exist, creates a new account and then updates Company Lookup on contact.

If you can afford, try using an Integration Tool (SSIS, Scribe). These tools are more flexible and feature-rich when comes to integration.

In my opinion, second approach (using Microsoft Flow) is an easier solution. However, if you can afford, an ETL tool is a better choice to handle large data sets and mapping requirements.

Let me know your thoughts and which approach you prefer.

Feel free to discuss, if you need further help.

Best,

Wahaj
barbieruelas 79 on at

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RE: Importing Account Information to D365 (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

Thanks!! What about best practices when uploading 2,000+ Contacts in some cases with an Account/Company that does not exist in CRM?

As an Admin, I constantly get sent large Contacts files for uploading but since I'm not 100% familiar with my users' Accounts, I'm not sure how I can streamline this process without getting so many errors and without having to check for any existing Account and manually correct the files before importing them.
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Wahaj Rashid 11,319 on at

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RE: Importing Account Information to D365 (Contacts, Opportunities, Account itself)

Hi,

Instead of the Account Name, you can use the Account Number field to map accounts during imports. This way, you can avoid errors causing because of duplicate names.

If you are not using Account Number, do the following:

Although the Account Number field is a System Field it is not added on the form out of the box. Add Account Number field to the Account form (not mandatory but recommended for readability).

Update the Account Number field of existing Accounts. Either copy Account Numbers from your source system or generate new.

In your import file, use the account number field instead of a name.

During import, in the map, map account lookup using Account Number instead of Account Name.

If the account numbers are unique, you should not get any errors.

Wahaj

(if it helps, mark it verified)