Customer Manager adding contact names

[stevelbpg]

In my small business, I often have 3-4 contact names for each of my customers and vendors. I often only know 1st names. I was pleased to see that Customer Manager allows for more than 2 contact names per account, with individual email and phone numbers... but, when you add a contact name, it treats the name as a new account... and when you sync with QB, it makes this name into a new Customer... so if you have 5 customers with an inside guy named Larry, in QB you'll have Larry1, Larry2, etc as new customers. Does anyone know how to apply simple contact names to accounts in Contact Manager without having QB make them into customers?

[jdupre]

I spent all of yesterday, and probably will continue throughought most of today, documenting the quirks of syncing Customer Manager v2 with Outlook 2000 and Quickbooks Pro 2005.

From what I can tell so far (although I can not say that I have tested this fully) THIS IS A BUG:

When you import your data from QB, and a customer record has info in the Contact and Alt. Contact fields, CM will parse these fields, create Related Contacts, and flag them as Hide, Public. But it will not add them to the Customers group. A memo of "Contact Person" is also set. If you then update the spelling of the name, it will get updated upon the next sync. (At this point it will also add the Related Contact to the customer group for some reason, but subsequent syncs do not attempt to create a new QB customer). Note that the phone and email for Related Contacts are not sync'ed. It is only the name.

However, I could not get this same behavior to occur on a record I created in CM myself. It only seems to work with records that were imported from QB.

When you sync and you have created a new "Related Contact" you must choose to NOT import the record into QB (or else it will indeed create another customer record (or vendor record, or however you marked it to be imported.) Marking a record as "Private" appears to only prevent scynchonization with other instances of CM. It does not prevent attempts at synchronization with QB.

The main problem with sync'ing to QB is that whenever a new record is created in CM (or imported into CM via annother contact manager like Outlook), QB assumes that you want it imported as a customer EVEN IF YOU DO NOT HAVE IT IN THE CUSTOMER GROUP! This is a very very bad assumption that really needs to be fixed. I would suggest a new sync option to only import records that are members of Customer, Employee, Vendor, or Other. Or to re-instate the "QB Ignore" group that was used for sync'ing in QB2001. Any contact in the QB Ignore group would be ignored durring sync.

- Joe