Merge Customers
Use Customer Merge to consolidate any duplicate customers or transfer site use activity from a customer or site that is no longer active or has been taken over by another customer or site. After the merge completes successfully, all activity that was previously associated with the old customer or site is now associated with the new customer or site. Activity includes invoices, debit memos, commitments, credits, receipts, adjustments, and chargebacks. The merge process also checks for records in the AutoInvoice interface tables.
Attention: In a sales tax based system, Receivables calculates tax based on the address components of your Sales Tax Structure (for example, State.County.City) that you define in the System Options window. Since tax rates can change over time, modifying one of these components could cause the tax for transactions previously assigned to this address to be invalid, and be in violation of US sales tax audit requirements.
For this reason, you can only merge customers or sites if the address components of their Sales Tax Structure are the same. For example, if your Sales Tax Location Flexfield Structure is State.County.City, you can only merge customers or sites that are located in the same state, county, and city. See: Setup Steps for US Sales Tax.
Merge Customers or Sites
You can either merge site uses for the same customer or all of the site uses for two different customers. Predefined site uses include Bill-To, Ship-To, Statements, Marketing, Legal, and Dunning. You can only merge a Bill-To site with a Bill-To site, a Ship-To site with a Ship-To site and so on whether you are merging different customers or two sites for the same customer.
You can also choose to either inactivate or delete your old customer and sites use information. If you choose to delete the customer or site use information, it is removed from the database and Receivables does not maintain an audit trail of this data. If you are merging sites for the same customer, you cannot choose to delete the old customer information (since the customers are the same).
Old customers and site uses that are merged are assigned a status of 'Inactive' after the merge process is complete. Inactive customers cannot generate new transactions, but you can view their information or reactivate them at any time in the Customers window.
Identify Duplicate Customers
Use the Duplicate Customer Report to see a list of all duplicate customers before you initiate the customer merge program. This report tries to match duplicate customer names based on the search criteria that you specify.
Review Customer Details
To see active or inactive customer information, use the Customer Listing Summary and Detail reports. The Detail report displays contacts, addresses, and relationships for each customer you choose in your search criteria. The Summary report displays a list of your customers and their addresses.
Merge Transactions From Other Applications
If you have any of the following applications installed and you run customer merge, the system automatically merges all transactions associated with the merge candidates in those applications as well:
- Master Scheduling /MRP Planning
Update Transaction Information
When you merge customers, Customer Merge updates the customer information for all of the old customers transactions. For example, if you merge ACME with Customer XYZ, the program updates all of ACME's transactions with Customer XYZ's ship-to and bill-to information.
Maintain Custom Data Integrity
If you have custom tables in your AR account that have foreign keys to RA_CUSTOMERS, RA_ADDRESSES, or RA_SITE_USES, you can use the package ARP_GENERIC_CMERGE to ensure that the foreign keys remain valid. This package needs to be modified to include your custom table names and foreign keys. Use the $AR_TOP/install/sql/arplbtrx.sql file as a guideline on how to modify this package.
See Also
Merging Customers
Merging Sites for the Same Customer
Merging Different Customers
