Method Community

Hello,

We have students taking online training from around the world. Some students take our training for free, while others end up paying. For this reason, we do not want to put all students into our CRM as customers. That said, we may have the need to create either activities or cases for either non-paying or paying students. Our goal being that eventually, non-paying students will eventually turn into paying students. However we don't want to clog up QuickBooks with non-paying customer, instead we would like them to remain as a Lead, while other students are actual customers.

A key piece of information that we use to track our students is their student number. This is a unique value for each student and allows us to connect the CRM to our LMS.

I need to setup a "StudentNumber" field in a table that can be accessed (Read/Write) by the Screens associated with Leads and Contacts.

When a Lead is generated, is the Lead Contact placed into the "Contacts" table? If not, where is the Lead Contact data stored?

If a lead is converted to a customer, will their data, including the custom "StudentNumber" field be merged into the "Contacts" table?

In what table should the PRIMARY field be established, and where do I need to "add a linked field" to make the necessary connections?

I appreciate your help. I have looked through the KB, but haven't found anything quite like this. I understand the concept of using a DropDown to link the tables, but I need to make sure I establisht he correct relationship so that data is shared properly.

Hi pdx971,

Customers and Leads are essentially the same thing, except that Leads do not sync with QuickBooks. Customers and Leads are both stored in the same table, the Customer table. There is a Yes/No field within the Customer table called IsLeadStatusOnly. This is the field that determines whether the record is a Customer or a Lead, and prevents or allows synchronization with QuickBooks. When Leads are converted to Customers, this flag is changed from True to False and the requisite information syncs over to QuickBooks.

Contacts are simply points of contact for your Customer or Lead. All Customers or Leads will have at least one Contact, but may have many more. All Contacts reside in the Contacts table.

Which table to put your field in really depends on whether it's the Customer or the Contact that should get a student number, or more specifically how you keep track of them. Does every Customer get one, and only one student number? If so, I'd say add the field to the Customer table. Do you have multiple Contacts that are students, but reside under the same Customer? Then you'd want to add the field to the Contacts table.

The Contacts table is already linked to the Customer table through the Customer dropdown. You could link the student number into the Contacts table through the Customer dropdown, but this would only be useful if you need to use the student number in screens or grids based off the Contacts table. It would also cause every Contact to have the same student number, since you're pulling it from the Customer, which would likely defeat the purpose of setting it up this way.

In terms of linking the Contacts table into the Customer table by adding a dropdown, I wouldn't do this. The relationship between the two tables is that Customers have many Contacts, but Contacts only have one Customer. Adding a Contact dropdown to the Customer table would circumvent this, which based on what you're trying to do wouldn't serve your purposes. I can see why you would want to add your student number field to either table, but you most likely won't need to link it into the other.

I think it would be a good opportunity for you to speak with a member of our Professional Services team, who can give you some more specific advice based on your unique workflow. Have you taken advantage of your free consulting hour?

- Justin

Thanks for the detailed infromation Justin.

One more questions. When adding a customer, the initial contact is created from the New Customer screen. It sounds like I need to add Student Number to the contact table, but how do I update that table/field from the New Customer screen when adding a customer (and therefore a contact) for the first time?

I think I would run into the same issue with the New Lead screen as well.

Would I use an Action Result to store the student number and then update the contact table? If that's the idea, could you give me a brief example?

Thanks for the help!

Hi pdx971,

This has to be done manually, since the Save All Sections action only saves information for the table the screen is based off of. You'll want to add a Textbox object (for your student number) to the screen, and add a few actions at the end of your Save button. 

You can use a Retrieve Value From Table action to save the RecordID from the Contacts table to an Action Result, where Entity_RecordID is the screen's currently active RecordID (this will be the Customer just saved by the Save All Sections action) and SpecialType is "Contact" (this is how Method designates the primary contact for a customer).

You can then use an Update Field In Table action to insert the value from your Textbox object into the StudentNumber field in your Contacts table, where the RecordID is the value you pulled in the previous action.

You will have to do this separately for both the New Customer and New Lead screens.

Hope this helps.

- Justin