Customer import details

Use customer import to create or update the people and companies that buy goods or services from your business. Customer records provide the identity, contact, sales, payment, tax, and other information used by quotes, orders, invoices, payments, returns, and customer reporting.

Customer records track information about your customers and enable you to view past transactions and communications with them.

Supported Operations

File Import for Customers is used to import external customer records into QuickStart, and to update fields related to existing customer records.

The following operations are supported for this record type:

• Create a new record

• Update an existing record

• Create a new or update an existing record

For more details about each operation, see Import a file.

Permissions and Features Required for Importing Customers

When importing customer records, the following fields are required:

• Primary Column: Enter sequential numbers beginning with 1.

• Customer Type: Enter Individual or Company.

• First Name: Enter a string of up to 255 ASCII characters.

• Last Name: Enter a string of up to 255 ASCII characters.

• Email: Enter a valid email address of up to 255 ASCII characters.

Note that depending on the customer type, not all these fields are required. See Usage Notes for more information.

Usage Notes

Each customer is defined as either an individual (a person) or a company using the Customer Type field.

• The Customer Type field is a string indicating whether the customer is a person or a company.
• The two acceptable values are Individual or Company.
• For the Company customer type, the Company Name field is required, but First and Last Name fields are not used.
• For the Individual customer type, the First and Last Name fields are required, but the Company Name field is not used.

Note:

Customer records can have internal and external IDs. In QuickStart, internal IDs are automatically assigned to the customer records. External IDs are user-defined and can be used to preserve data parity with external applications.

For a list of internal IDs associated with each customer, download the result file when import processing is finished.

After identifying the correct internal IDs, use them to relate contacts and other records to the customers.

For more details about using internal or externals IDs, see Reference existing records.

Use the Customer category to relate customer categories to customer records.

Note:

In the CSV template, remove all empty columns related to unused fields to avoid errors during import.

Example of Import File

The following table is an example of the Customer_ADD.csv file when using external IDs.

Primary Column	* Customer Type	External ID (set)	First name	Last name	Email
1	Individual	CUSCON	Customer First Name	Customer Last Name	[e-mail]

Note:

If the Customer Type is Company, then Company Name is also a required field.