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 Michael - have you tried using the Additional Attributes for Customers and storing your account number in there?
You could easily import / map your old customer numbers into an Additional Attribute field. For new accounts you'd need to manually create an account number - however DEAR does automagically make a 32 character unique ID for the customer. That's probably a little long for what you want but taking the first or last, say, 4 or 5 characters would be almost certainly unique with a database of less than 10,000 customers. This unique ID can be seen when you visit a Customer in DEAR as everything after the # (in bold here:)
https://inventory.dearsystems.com/Customer#e4d26737-fc52-442e-9709-3f06fa3d2194
When sending emails or documents these attributes can be referenced. Page 18 of this doc shows the available mailmerge fields:
http://dearsystems.com/inventory-software/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/MailMergeFields.pdf
I know it's not exactly what you are asking for but it's currently functional in DEAR and would be reasonably quick for you to implement and start using.
I was totally flabbergasted when I found out that Dear couldn't support 2 customers having the same name. At first I thought it was a mistake so even after their support told me it was not possible I opened another ticket in case the support agent had given me the wrong info.
Every other system I have come across uses a unique number for the customer.
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.
I agree that this would be a great feature to have.