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.
Hi Tim. How do you 'get' the GUID without the API which is not given away for free? (Hence my skeptical world view.)
My guess is that we are all at different stages on our journey of becoming programmers... In the mean time, pragmatically, a visible account number would solve the issue for a lot of us.
You say the customer shouldn't have to remember their account number. I say it isn't necessarily for their benefit, but rather for internal administration of information that DEAR is not built do cater for.
Another argument for you. How much cleaner would it be if there was an option for DEAR and XERO to sync by an account number? Instead we have to diligently ensure the the Company names match in both systems. Or hope the fuzzy AI does a reasonable job.
I guess if we really desperately want to use Account number we can (as someone has previously noted). We'll just have to put up with using an additional attribute buried on the page for now.
Steve - the GUID (dear calls it the Customer ID) is covered in a few other posts so it might be worth re-reading this thread from the start.
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
The way these are generated means you could use the first or last blocks and still be extremely confident you'll never have a duplicate. In the above example e4d26737 or 3f06fa3d2194 are both essentially unique.
The Customer ID is not available through any of the Mail Merge fields but it would be pretty easy to assign the same GUID as an Additional Attribute, or I'm sure it would be fairly easy for DEAR to add the ability to reference the Customer ID through the Mail Merge.
Another option if you're wedded to the idea of having the Customer Name as unique if for you to use that as your customer ID and type your manually created account number when you create the customer. Then use the "Contact" aspect of the customer to add their real name.
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Having the same problem as outlined very well in Robert Thomson's post. Magento 2 in our case. Agree that "a non unique Name field and a unique CustomerID field would solve many issues".
It would save us a lot of headaches and the common occurrence of the data of customers with the same name piling into one customer account.
Absolutely agree with this! We NEED this to service our clients smoothly and efficiently. We simply have too many clients with the same names. PLEASE implement this.
Completely agree with the NEED for customer codes. The GUID is not a customer code and should not be used as such.
This is industry standard and we were very disappointed when we realised that this feature was not available.
I would add that we also need a code for each customer address, this is especially important when trying to update addresses via CSV because there is no unique identifier for each address in the import file. When doing a "create/update" it always create a new address instead updating the existing one.
Really, really needed - we use a customer field, but it doesn't check for duplictes, so not a good option really, but there's no other way I know of. Please please sort this @Tristan Thomas.
This is a basic lack with the system sadly.
@Jonathan Pons I do not work for DEAR so I cannot help you beyond suggestions to work around this.
As I've said above - DEAR DOES provide a unique customer ID in the GUID, and it also supplies these GUIDs for each customer address.
Without knowing your workflow I can't be of much help, however the concept of a customer ID that the customer needs to remember seems incredibly outdated to me. Email addresses or phone numbers seem to have taken the place of this concept, and if you search an email address or a phone number in the Sale > Customers / Credits section it will return any/all Customers using this email address. For talking with customers over the phone or in person this seems like a good way of finding their unique Customer.
For integrating systems the GUID works well because, well, it's unique, and machines don't care about the time it takes to send a long string of characters.
We've been using DEAR for a long time now and initially we struggled to use some of our existing processes with the new system, but that's going to the case when you use any new tool whether digital or physical. Over time we've adapted our processes to make the most of DEAR, and from that point of view we've found it to be a pretty good system.
Best of luck and if you have any questions please ask, but remember that I'm not a DEAR employee.
Blah blah blah. Many of us are not convinced @Tristan Thomas.
Products have a Description. And they have an SKU that is chosen by the user.
Customers have a Name. They should also have a unique identifier that can be chosen by the user.
@Jonathan Pons you may or may not have thought about using one of your Additional Attributes for the Customer ID. I believe that a poor substitute and it should have its own prominent field.
"Customers have a Name. They should also have a unique identifier that can be chosen by the user. "
They do. ITS THE NAME FIELD. IT'S UNIQUE.
Call them "John Smith 1234" if you insist on having a customer number. As I said, I can't see any use for a customer number in the modern world, but there are plenty of ways to work around this if it's critical to your business and you're unwilling to change your workflow.
@Tristan Thomas
Maybe this works for you and we can always change try to change our workflows and adapt to a system, but it doesn't mean the system cannot be improved.
This is especially true when the feature request is as basic as this.
Here are a few things that make the lack of a visible customer ID / address ID really problematic :
- Cannot change the customer names via CSV import
- Because the addresses don't have a "Company name" field, the customer name is the one being used for billing/shipping and we can't use "John Smith 1234"
- The customer additional attributes where a custom "Customer Code" could be used cannot be retrieved by the API or used in printing documents
- Potential issues with special characters in customer names
- Email could be a good workaround but it is tied to a contact and not at the customer level
Really hoping that Dear could take this more seriously
couldn't agree with more with @Alex Ludo
Because of the lack of a unique customer number I am unable to make any changes to a CSV and import that information.
This has had a negative ripple on our accounting department as well as fulfillment.
Please Dear, implement customer numbers.
If MYOB is able to offer a customer number that you can opt in or out of, surely Dear can.
I agree that this would be a great feature to have.
The CSV update issue is frustrating. I would expect to see just the Dear Customer ID in the first column though. So that the importer can check the ID to see if we have changed the name of the customer. Changing customer names in bulk can be really helpful. Much like updating products and syncing by SKU.
I'm really wondering how the most popular feature request, very simple to fix and created on this forum 7 years ago can still be completely ignored by Dear.
Can someone from the team reply?
Yes please!
How has this been a feature request for over 7 years and never been implemented?
Please implement this ASAP!