Method Community

Hi,

We're new the method API and wanted to make sure we're creating records in the right way. We need to create customer records and contact records.

Scenario 1: the customer is an individual (not a company), do we create a customer record, leave the company field blank, then create a contact record? I see that the contacts table links back to the Entity table not the customer, so I'm not sure if we should be therefore creating an entity not a customer? or when creating the Customer record that creates the entity record.

Scenario 2: they are a company , so similar to above, create a customer, fill in company name field, create a contact.

Also, in the customer table there is a field called CustomerType which seems to link to FullName, should we be setting a value in this field if we are creating customer records?

Any advice will be gratefully received.

Thanks.

Hi LizT,

Scenario 1:

Yes, you can create a Customer record and leave the CompanyName field blank. You don't have to worry about the Contact record, it will be automatically created when you insert the Customer.

The Customer, Vendor, and Employee tables are just "views" of the Entity table. The Entity table consists of all three entity types. When inserting via the API I would recommend using the Customer table if the entity type is a Customer or a Lead. 

Scenario 2:

Similar to Scenario 1. You also don't have to manually create the Contact in this scenario. It should happen automatically when inserting into Customer. 

CustomerType is a QuickBooks field and is not required to insert into the Customer table. 

Hope this helps! 

Jason

Hi Jason,

Thanks, we got it working.

One question though, if a customer has a company name I can see that in quickbooks it displays the customer record as the contact name not the company name (you can edit the customer in QB and change the display name to be the company name but ideally if it's a company it needs to default display as a company in QB as that's who will be invoiced, not the individual contact. ) Is there a field in the api we should be setting when we create the customer record?

Thannks in advance,

Liz

Hi Liz,

Yes, the field you are looking for is Customer.Name. This is the name in QuickBooks. In this scenario, it is common to have the company name in both the Name field and the CompanyName field. 

Jason

Great, many thanks Jason.