Bulk Loading Customers and Accounts didn't load where expected

Retailer is trying to bulk load customers, some with charge accounts, and data didn't load where expected. The Excel spreadsheet had the following columns (presented vertically in this document, but columns are across in Excel)

Column Name Used	Sample Data	Comments
Name	SJ Cooper
Company	Skewbeen
Phone
Mobile	123456
email	sjc@example.com
last sale	23 May 2022	Cannot be loaded
sellingmessage
state	QLD
post code	4116
phone2
lastname	Cooper
last contact message		Not currently loaded
last contact		Not currently loaded
keywords
floor limit	1000
firstname	Sarah
fax
disablecrm
contact comment
comments	Transfered from XYZ
city	Drewvale
birthday
address1	3 Some Street
address2	Irgendwo Town
address	3 Some Street
accountTerms
AccountCreditLimit	1000	Did not load
Accid		Caution. Suggest removing
ABN
EmailReceipts	1
name (account)	Skebn
(account) balance	95.97
(account) stopcredit

The retailer appears to have taken an existing Fieldpine Customer List to create the columns in Excel. To this they've added a few extra columns at the end to supply specific account details. This 100% fine and what most retailers do. Often they are loading a large list from external sources, so changing a few column headings is easy

Recap. Fieldpine separates customers (people who make purchases) and accounts (charge accounts). A charge account may have several customers that all charge to the account. This allows sales to be tracked to who made the sale (customer), vs who pays for the sale (account). A classic example is that the "customer" may show that the personal assistant makes most of the purchases, even though the payments are via the "account". Marketing wise, the PA is potentially the decision maker.

Example. One Account, 3 customers
	---	Customer "Sue"
Account "ACME"	---	Customer "Mary"
	---	Customer "Bob"

FYI. When loading a "customer" and also requesting an account be automatically created, the following logic is used

Any value that was directly specified using "(account) xxx" or "xxx (account)" (both forms are interchangeable) is applied to the new account
If the new account does not have a name, the customers name is used
If the new account does not have an address1 value, then all the customer address1 through address6 are copied. The code was also changed to copy fields "state", "city", and "postcode" in response to this question.
If the new account does not have each of the following values, the value from the customer is copied
- credit_limit
- floor_limit
- phone
- email
- mobile
If the field "(account) balance" was given and the value was not zero, then an account adjustment is added with the comment "Imported balance". This ensures the opening balance on the account is correct

Last Sale

This is an output only field for Fieldpine. It shows the last sale date for a customer. You cannot set this value as it is automatically calculated based on sales

Last Contact Message & Last Contact

These two fields are output only. They are taken from the contact log, which is stored in a different area. It would be possible to have these comments load if required, but the current version of code does not permit this.

Accid

This field contains the internal account number this customer belongs too. This is very dangerous to directly load as you are forcing the internal reference to this value, but it is permitted. Primarily this field would be bulk loaded where you are adding a large number of customer records to an existing account. In this case the retailer is attempting to create a customer and associated account, so the Fieldpine loader should be left to allocate this number itself.

Floor Limit

Floor limits can be set at both the customer and account level. (A floor limit sets the maximum that can be charged in a single sale, much like an approval limit) As the Excel column name is "floor limit" this is setting the floor limit for the customer. However, as this load file did not specify a different account floor limit, this limit will be copied to the account as well. See FYI above.

Floor limits on customers (vs accounts) are rarely used. Under system settings you can control which of the various floor/credit limits are applied at the POS

AccountCreditLimit

This keyword used to load an account credit limit via a customer definition. However time has moved on and the newer way of doing this is to use the keyword "(account) credit limit" which is the general form that can be used when loading a customer to access any/all related account fields. The keyword "AccountCreditLimit" has other conditions around its use, and will now be deprecated. Use "(account) credit limit" instead.

Address Fields

Fieldpine implements addresses in two ways, a single free form box called "address", and also individual components such as "address1", "city", "postcode" Internally the code manages them both. However, this customer load specified both styles, the single "everything" field (address) and also the individual broken out parts (address1/city etc).

Fieldpine will generally handle this without issue, especically if one or the other is blank. But, if you specify both forms, and they have different values then you may find one overwrites the other at some stage. Our advice is to only use one style in the bulkload.