Data Importing - Who does it in your organization?

[meovino]

Who (as in what type of employee) in your organization is responsible for importing data into SugarCRM? Our users would like admin assistants of our National Account Executives (most of whom are not very computer savvy) to be able to import data themselves, but they are put off by the complexity of the import process (especially the need to upload Accounts first, then download the accounts to get the IDs, the associate the Account IDs with Contacts so they do not have to do manual associations). We're a large organization with thousands of customers, and we'd like to upload everything into Sugar at some point. But the import process may actually force us to go with another product if we insist upon allowing admins to do uploads.

[JVWay]

But you shouldn't need to download the accounts again if you already know the association. You just have to have a common field.

Like when I did an import from Salesforce data, I imported the accounts and my contacts file had the account name in the same row as the contact info. Sugar associated it automatically.

But even given that I wouldn't want anybody that wasn't fairly savvy importing data into any system. That's just a recipe for disaster.

JW

[meovino]

But you shouldn't need to download the accounts again if you already know the association. You just have to have a common field.

Like when I did an import from Salesforce data, I imported the accounts and my contacts file had the account name in the same row as the contact info. Sugar associated it automatically.

But even given that I wouldn't want anybody that wasn't fairly savvy importing data into any system. That's just a recipe for disaster.

JW

So did you create the Accounts, then import the Contacts with the exact same account name? We've done that, and it creates new (duplicate) Account records and associates the Contacts with those new records. An all-in-one import would be great, but we need to associate the Accounts with a parent account, and I don't see where I can set the Parent ID field in the Contacts import.

As for your other comment, I agree. I'm trying to make the case that importing data should be an admin function.

[JVWay]

Yes, I imported the accounts and then imported the contacts. It's been quite some time since I did this but I didn't get duplicates of the account.

As far as child accounts go then you do have to import the parent, export it to get the sugar guid and then use it to join up. I did this as well. Took a couple tries but it worked fine. Even went three levels deep.

[meovino]

Yeah, we got the parent/child thing working no problem. Well, once we reorganized our list view to get the export to work properly.

I just went in with a new CSV file and did what you suggested (using the exact same data in the Name field of Accounts and the Account Name field of Contacts), and it made the link perfectly. I swear we tried this exact same thing yesterday and we got duplicate accounts.

Bizarre. But thanks for getting me to try this again. You may have saved Sugar in our enterprise.