Importing Contacts with same Account name

[jkitsmiller]

Our customers are government agencies and so many times we will have the same Account Name in different states.

For example, Jefferson County in AL, AR, CO, TX.

When I do an import of the Contacts it just creates one account and puts all the contacts from each state into the same Account.

In Salesforce I had a Site field that I would put the State in so as it was importing it would distinguish the Account Name.

Is there anyway to do this in Sugar, to keep Account Names with the same name separate based on some criteria, i.e. State?

Thanks,

John

[Markku]

Account name has to be unique, so you have to create separate accounts named (as an example) "Jefferson County AL", "Jefferson County AR" and so on.

[jkitsmiller]

Actually I can create multiple accounts with the same name and have. I just don't seem to have a way during import to import the contacts into the correct accounts.

I don't want to change the Account Name to something other than the true name of the County because if I do a mail merge or some other marketing I don't want to call them something I have made up rather than their true name. For example, if I were working with Microsoft in the US and working with Microsoft in Finland I would not address them as Microsoft US and Microsoft Finland. To be as effective as possible with marketing materials I would just say Microsoft. Similarly I don't want to add something to the name of a Sheriff's Office that is not already a part of it.

I hope this makes sense. As I said the way Salesforce seemed to get around this is by adding a "Site" field that it compared the Account Name against during import. So that <AccountName=Jefferson County Sheriff's Office/Site=AL> was different than <AccountName=Jefferson County Sheriff's Office/Site=CO>

[Markku]

Hi jkitsmiller,

What you just said makes sense, and yes, you can use the same account name several times and have their internal ID to be unique, my mistake, sorry.

However when importing contacts using Sugar import tool, the account name is the unique identifier. In your case you'll probably be better off importing data directly to Sugar database instead of using built-in import tool. In doing so you can define state as an additional key and import your contacts correctly.

[jkitsmiller]

Thanks for the info.

[Markku]

No problem at all. If you have any questions regarding importing data directly into the database, please do not hesitate to ask.

Best,

- Markku