Deferred Customer account numbers
It would be nice to be able to add a customer account number when creating a new customer as well as just their name. Xero has an option to assign account numbers to customers which is handy when sending out statements as customers can use their account number as a reference when making payment. Right now I have to add account numbers manually in xero once the customer has been created in DEAR.
This would also be helpful when using your integrated POS and setting up a loyalty program. I could offer a loyalty card to customers with a unique barcode or number sequence that represents that customers account number.
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i have also asked for this feature. an additional field that can be searched for where we can have a unique number for assiging to that account.
i have had customers ask what is their account number so that they can include it in EFT payments so that their payment is allocated to their account correctly.
so far we have not had an issue but with well over 1000 active accounts, we expect sooner or later a payment received might be allocated to the wrong account without this simple data.
further more, when i pay all our suppliers, i put in the account number that is on their statement, it helps temp staff allocate payments correctly.
also, lots of our customers still come in and say their old account number because it's quicker for me to put in an account code that search through all the businesses, whose name starts with the town we are opperating in.
in Retail manager that we came from, we used to have letters like "RSSW" as an account code for customers with an account and numbers like "180" for COD customers.
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There are a couple of ways to achieve this with current DEAR functionality:
1) DEAR does generate a unique identifier for each Customer or Supplier. This identifier is the characters after the # in the Customers URL (in bold below) and can be found by visiting the Customer (Sale > View All Customers then select a customer) and looking at the URL.
ie: https://inventory.dearsystems.com/Customer#e4d26737-fc52-442e-9709-3f06fa3d2194
This unique identifier is not manually setable or changeable and is too long to use as a reference on bank payments, however since it's randomly generated you could use, say, the first 8 characters with an extremely low chance of two of your customers having the same first 8 characters.
This unique identifier is NOT currently available through the available mailmerge fields, although I'm sure this would be a reasonably easy thing for DEAR to add.
You can access this via the API as well:
Request
2) You can set an Additional Attribute. You will need to create an Attribute Set for Customers, and then you can manually set your identifier. There are DEAR supplied instructions for creating and setting Additional Attribute sets, and you can even set a default for all Customers.
Manually setting the identifier isn't ideal, however can certainly be done. There would be no way of checking that the manually added identifier was unique. As above you could use the first, say, 8 characters of the customers DEAR-supplied URL which a high level of confidence.
The Additional Attributes are available through the mailmerge fields and thus can be added into Sales Orders, Statements etc sent from DEAR however I don't *think* they're pushed through to Xero.
YES! Additional Attribute are searched in both the Sale list and the Customer list through the DEAR front-end.
You CANNOT search for Additional Attributes through the API for either Sales or Customers (at this time; May 2017)
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@Michael Davis I don't think it's always fair to want a system to conform to your particular workflow. Generally the idea behind a unique identifier like an account number is that it never changes.
Using DEAR, for example, you could assign one Additional Attribute field for a unique ID. Another Additional Attribute field could be assigned as a drop-down for your various account classes.
DEAR's in-built functionality allows you to edit a customers credit terms from the customer dashboard.
If you have 4000 customers it would be pretty simple and error-free to use a spreadsheet to update their details rather than do it manually.
@Tristan Thomas, I agree about solving problems for the market rather than custom specific requests.
However, the heart of the issue here, is that DEAR does not create or use a unique identifier for Customers. Using customer name as the uniqueness constraint prevents it from syncing properly with QBO.
While using Additional Attributes as you outlined above is interesting, there is no way to enforce a uniqueness constraint in an Additional Attribute.
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@Michael Davis I'm not suggesting you don't try to improve DEAR by logging requests for improvements. I'm just trying to show that it's often impossible to implement existing workflows with new software and sometimes there are functional work-arounds which you can use rather than waiting for the software to be built.
I'd love to see your (1) and (2) suggestions implemented. Why don't you start a new Feature Request for each of these and see if other DEAR users agree?
For (3) you can search a Sales by Product Details Report for a single SKU giving sales info on just that one product.
I have implemented half a dozen systems both SaaS and server based and have yet to see one, apart from Dear, that doesn't have a searchable vendor/customer code that is unique for every entry.
While your work-around is fine for a small number of customers it is still time-consuming and not really workable for a large customer database.
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Thanks @David Wawicki.
I appreciate hearing that. I'm not asking for anything "special" or custom.
I thought it was a basic need.
the idea of managing it on an excel spreadsheet is just as bad as using additional attributes.
why have two systems that talk and share information and then use a separate excel spreadsheet? too many pieces in the system, considering this is a basic expectation within the industry.
Xero can handle an account being both a supplier and a customer which i think is great, but unnecessary for Dear.
It does seem to create some duplication issues between the two programs though when we try to sync.
I think unique identifiers could resolve this.
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