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I'm trying to create an order page on the Contacts Portal where our customers can place an order and it will link to Quickbooks.  I'm using the QuickBooks_SalesOrder template, but when I do that and log in with my test account, under the Customer:Job dropdown, it shows all the customers in my quickbooks.  I want it to just automatically load with the customer in the account.

Hi DAllen100

I just need to check a few things before coming back with an answer. The extra information might determine how we approach this. 

- How would the customer be logging in to the portal?

- Would all contacts for a customer be able to create a sales order or just the main contact? 

- Do you want to restrict the selectable customers in the dropdown to only the relevant customer?

- Would there ever be a situation where you would have a customer set up as a job of another customer eg. a project for Customer 1 would be show as 'Customer 1:Project'?

- If so would you want the logged in contact to be able to create a sales order for both the customer and the project?

If you are only concerned about restricting the selectable customer to the main company and not and related jobs this will be quite easy to set up. If you want it to include jobs it can get very complicated very quickly. Let me know your answers and I'll see what we can do.

Jeff

Thanks for your reply, Jeff.

We're going to start off by just sending the link to the portal to all our existing clients that we have quickbooks accounts set up.  We may eventually add a link to the website in the future.  We want them to be able to create an account linked to their quickbooks account.

What I would like is, once a customer is logged in, when they want to place an order, the page defaults to show their account info, such as their company and customer name and address, and possibly make changes to the shipping address if needed.

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks.

Hi DAllen100

We'll keep it reasonably straightforward then. I'll go with the assumption that you've taken a copy of the Sales Order screen and added it as a tab link to the Contacts Portal. If not and you're stuck just let me know.

Prepopulating the Customer name

One thing you might notice about the Sales Order screen is the ellipses button (three small circles) next to the Customer:Job dropdown. You don't want this to show on your portal page because it allows anyone who signs in to see all of your customer information. I removed the Customer:Job object from the screen then added a readonly textbox because I only want to show the current Customer's name.

Step 1 - Remove Customer:Job dropdown box from the screen

Step 2 - Add a textbox object in its place. Edit the textbox and give it the Caption 'Customer' and caption location of 'Top'. Click the 'Advanced Options (click to show)' link and check the box next to 'Read Only'. Click 'Finish'.

Step 3 - Click the 'Advanced...' button the top left section and click 'Next'. When the screen loads we want to populate the Customer text field with the Customer name of the logged in Contact. Choose 'OnScreenLoad' for the Event and 'Retrieve Value From Table' for the action. Click 'Add Action'

Step 4 - Set the values to what you see below. We want to grab the Customer's FullName and we find that by looking up the Customer table and finding the FullName based on the Customer Record ID. We can grab this from a session value called 'Portal - Entity Record ID' which is the Record ID for the Customer the logged in Contact belongs to. When we have the name we want to put it into the Customer field on the screen. Click 'Save & Close'

Step 5 - Before we close out of the Advanced Screen Properties there is a left over action from the dropdown that causes an error. For me it was the 6th Action 'Enter Value Into Field on Screen - _Put resultTransactionEntity into the Customer dro...' You can either reassign this to the Customer text field or just delete it.

Step 6 - To autopopulate the other fields such as billing and shipping addresses you can copy the action from step 4 and replacing the 'From Field' and the 'Place value in' values

Step 7 - Before we finish off you should also add a filter(s) to the SalesOrderList grid in the 'Existing Sales Orders' section to only show Sales Orders relating to the relevant Customer. Have a go at doing this yourself and get back to me if you need a hand. Tip: You could also delete each of the existing ones so they can't be used by the logged in Contact.

Disclaimer: This won't be a perfect solution as it doesn't take into account a few features you may in the future want to include. There may be other ways more suited to doing this but hopefully the above will give you a good place to start. I'd also recommend thoroughly testing every aspect of the screen before letting your contacts use it.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Jeff

Thank you, that was a great help.

Hi, I have followed these directions to allow customers to submit orders through their portal, but still receive a "Customer field required" error message although the field is auto-populated. 

I did look in the customer and entity tables, but was not able to de-select the "required" box for customer. 

Could you please help me understand where I've missed a step?

Thanks!

Shara

Hey Shara,

If you would like to either post here or private message me screenshots of your customization for Steps 3 & 4 I can take a look at it.

As soon as the Order Portal opens up for your customers it auto populates the required field "Customer" FullName by linking their RecordID to the session active RecordID.

-- Mortaza