Importing Customers to Quickbooks Link

[OriginalTouch]

Anybody Using Quickbooks Link - How do you find it?

There have been queries in the past to do with importing customers that don't seem to have been resolved and this is creating an issue for us, so it would be good to hear if anyone has worked it out yet.

We need to be able to import new customer accounts into Quickbooks.

Retail Customers obviously get put into generic Internet Shopper records. Great.
Registered Customers with an account set up get transferred to their relative accounts in Quickbooks too. Great.

However how about:

A new registered customer with an External Reference field that matches Quickbooks. - Can we import this order and have the new address fields input for us with the order? At the moment, we are having to set up the whole customer record manually in Quickbooks including addresses etc before they are registered as the same account. It would save us a lot of time if we could just add a new customer in Quickbooks by Name, match that to the External Reference in Actinic and all of the Customer new details are imported.

Secondly, if you have a customer with different jobs (ie delivery addresses), how do people find that the referencing works?

[cdicken]

There's no automatic way to do this, but the 'Marketing | Mailing List' export feature allows you to export customer details from Actinic into a standard spreadsheet format. I'm sure this could be tinkered with in Excel to make it into a format that is compatible with QuickBooks.

[OriginalTouch]

Thanks for the idea. That would be okay for a large number of customers, such as when starting Actinic or upgrading.
However, it would be too much hassle for every order that you want to assign a new account on an "as and when" basis. (such as Actinic allows you to do when creating a new customer account from an order).

We have found that the customer is not recognised by External Reference alone. Even if the account has an External Reference in both Quickbooks and Actinic, the order is still assigned to Internet Shopper. However, you also don't have to have every single address field filled in. In our tests so far, it seems that you need to have at least matching email addresses and perhaps phone numbers too. At the moment, we are not sure how reliable this is?

It would be nice if possible to have in Quickbooks Link a method of adding to Quickbooks a single new customer account from a new order - maybe add to the wishlist for the new link for Quickbooks 2008 (but please also make it backwards compatible with older versions of Quickbooks as the 2008 version lacks certain features)?

[cdicken]

OK Sam - I've added this to the wish list.