Setting up 6000+ Parent/Child National Customer Accounts for Central Billing

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Member

Sorry if this has already been asked, I am new and could not find any info on the subject in searches, so hoping someone has some ideas or advice on this.

We are setting up GP 2013 R2 for the first time, and just imported several thousand customer records. We have several large customers who do central billing and have 2000+ branches (or child accounts). I am being told we must setup these thousands of child account associations one by one manually.

I find this hard to believe because of how common this scenario is. Any business that works with 7-11 or Walmart or Sears etc.. would have the same kind of scenario. Certainly GP was not built oblivious to this, so there must be an intended way Microsoft had in mind for associating all the child accounts to the parent en masse without having to do 10K of them by hand.

Anyone know the prescribed or intended method MS had in mind for accommodating this kind of initial setup? How are you supposed to make so many children associate with a single parent National Account? Surely the intent was not to make customers enter them by hand. Right?

Thanks!

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (1)

Verified answer

L Vail 65,271 on at

Like (3)

Report

Hi,

I do not know of a predefined method that GP had in mind, but I do have a couple of suggestions. Those fields are not available in Integration Manager. You can import them quickly with either SmartConnect, eConnect, or VKonnact. If you don't have any of those options, you can insert/update them using direct table writes with SQL. So long as you are adding new record you could use the Import Utility which is another kind of direct table write except it can't update. It can only insert.

The tables you'll need to update are the Corporate Customer Number field in the Customer Master. In SQL terms that's RM00101.CPRCSTNM. The children are stored in the National Accounts Master at RM00105.

If you don't like the idea of doing direct table writes that bypass all of GPs business logic, you could update or set them up using a macro. We would make use of the Mail Merge feature of Word to build the macro from your source file. It could be an Excel spreadsheet for instance. Using a macro would respect all of the business rules and make sure all of the tables were properly updated. Running a macro repeats key strokes so it's as if you were sitting in front of the monitor entering them by hand. Of course, the macro runs much faster.

That's about all I've got off the top. Stay tuned, there are probably more ideas coming.

Kind regards,

Leslie

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
babubaskaran@outloo... 12 on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi,

I agree with Leslie to import data through macro which is my all time favourite.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

Thank you! Good ideas and thoughts on the subject. Taken under advisement for sure, look forward to hearing any other thoughts ideas or angles we can take on this problem

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

I've used SmartConnect to upload my customers and created my accounts but I cannot get the map to associate the Parent and Child Accounts together.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No