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What goes in the 'Name' field when importing new leads, Company Name or Lead (Person) Name?

I'm importing from excel. The data includes a company name and a contact name and title but not in all cases. I insert the contact name (concatenate FirstName and LastName) if it exists and the company name if it does not. But I'm not sure this is correct as it seems to conflict with some comments about the name field being a foreign key in the contacts file pointing to the customer file record (i.e. this contact works for that company). If I always insert the company name, then I only get the company name in the leads screen.

Hi Jim,

To Answer your question "What goes in the 'Name' field when importing new leads, Company Name or Lead (Person) Name?" 

The name field can contain either of these values. The current way you are Importing works perfectly fine. The Name field is actually not the uniquely identifying field in either the Customers or Contacts Table(although it is required in both), but infact the FullName field is. The FullName field is the linked field, and contains a combination of ParentFullName and Name.

The Reason Name is different from FirstName/LastName and CompanyName is because the name can be anything; You might be dealing with a person, a company, or a group of companies or any number of other combinations. 

Hopefully this clears things up. Let me know if I can be of any more assistance.

Thanks Jim.

Regards,

Ben

Ben -

Outstanding! That answered my question. Thanks.

This issue is closed.