Best way to setup CommitCRM

I'm well into my trial and getting ready to purchase, but have a question as to what to do with my data.

I have already sync'd in my data from QuickBooks, but I have lots of other records in Outlook that I may want to have in CommitCRM as a repository for things such as Vendors, colleagues, etc. I tried a sync with Outlook Contacts and now have tons of duplicates.

What's the best way to handle this data? Should I:
1. Keep just ACCOUNTS that are in QuickBooks in CommitCRM (about 250)
2. Sync all contact records in Outlook including Non-Clients (about 1700)

Thanks for your advice,
Scott

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your question.

When you have two data sources for accounts, such as QuickBooks and Outlook, you can use RangerMSP as the central database which centralizes all customers in a single place. In order to avoid duplicate records, you should let the system know which records already exist in the database before synchronizing the customers.

Since most of your customers and contacts are in Outlook, I would start by importing all contacts from Outlook. I assume these will include all or some of the accounts which exist in QuickBooks as well.

If you now import the accounts from QuickBooks, this will create duplicates for accounts which were already imported from Outlook. What you can do is link the accounts which exist in RangerMSP with the equivalent account in QuickBooks first (click here to read how to perform this linking). This can be done one-by-one only. In order make this process easier, you may consider linking the account to the QuickBooks customer on-the-fly, only when you actually need to use it (e.g. when you actually create the invoice for this customer for the first time), rather than perform it on a mass of records.

When creating an invoice, using the Invoice Creation Wizard, if the Account is not linked to any QuickBooks customer yet, the wizard will popup a message in the final generation step, and will suggest linking this Account to an existing QuickBooks customer/job, or creating it in QuickBooks. So you actually don't need to create/link any Accounts in advance, but rather simply create them on the fly each time you create the invoice for the first time for each account.

I hope this makes sense. You can find some more details on this in the Setup Guide under Importing Accounts From QuickBooks.

Dina

If I understand the question as it was intended, I had a similar question. Any Outlook contact that I did not want to appear as a CommitCRM account, I just marked as private in Outlook.

How do you remove an account in CommitCRM as a result of forgetting to mark the record private in Outlook? I keep forgetting to ask.

Once the contact was already imported into RangerMSP, the link between the records already exists and deleting in RangerMSP will delete it in Outlook as well when synchronizing. What you can do it remove the link between these records, so deleting the record in RangerMSP will not affect the same contact in Outlook.

To do this:

1) Unlink these records - open the account in RangerMSP, go to Accounts > Tools > Remove Link Between Account and Outlook Contact.

2) After removing the link, delete the account in RangerMSP

3) Mark the contact in Outlook as "private" so it will not be transferred to RangerMSP next time you sync. Make sure to setup the sync options not to transfer private accounts.

I Hope this helps.

Ethan