Combining Customers and Contact Persons
In HansaWorld Enterprise version 5.0, the previously separate Contact Person register was incorporated into the combined Customer/Supplier register, which was re-named the Contact register. When you update from 4.3 or earlier to 5.0 or later, you will need to copy your Contact Person information out of the old Contact Person register into the Contact register. You must do this before you can use your Contact Person information anywhere in the system (e.g. before you can create Customer Letters or quote Contact Person information in Quotations, Orders or Invoices).
In 5.0 and later, the old Contact Person register can be found in the Technics module, where it is a setting. You can add new Contact Persons to this register, but you will not be able to use them in other registers. To be able to do this, you should only add new Contact Persons to the new unified Customer/Contact register.
To convert Contact Persons to Contacts, you will need to work in the Technics module. If you are working in a multi-user system and 'Technics' is not available when you click the [Select Module] button in the Master Control panel, the probable reason is that you have logged on as a Person that does not have access privileges for this module. If you are the system administrator, it is recommended that your Person record should belong to an Access Group that Starts from Full Access and explicitly grants full access to the Technics module. In a single-user system, the probable reason is that the Server option is not checked in the Configuration setting in the System module.
To copy Contact Persons to the Contact register, change to the Technics module and run the 'Convert Contact Persons to Contacts' Maintenance function. If you have more than one Company, you will need to run the function separately in each Company.
- Start with Code
- Paste Special
Customers and Suppliers in Contact register
- Specify here the Contact Number that is to be given to the first new Contact record.
- If you specify a Contact Number that has already been used, the function will not copy any Contact Persons into the Contact register.
- Take care to specify a Contact Number that is followed by a sequence of free numbers that is large enough for all your Contact Persons. If this is not the case, the available sequence will be filled and subsequent Contact Persons will not be imported. For example, you have 100 Contact Persons. You enter Contact Number 500 in this field, but you already have a Contact Number 550. Contact records will be created with Contact Numbers 500-549 for the first 50 Contact Persons, and the remaining Contact Persons will not be imported. If you activate the 'Paste Special' function from this field, click the [All Contacts] button and reverse the sort in the No. column, you will see the highest Contact Number that has already been used. If you need to find out how many Contact Persons you have, to see if a sequence of free numbers is large enough, print a Record Count report from the Technics module, specifying "ContactVc" as the Register.
- If you do not specify a Contact Number in this field, the function will find the last Contact record that you entered and continue the numbering sequence from there.
- Set Cust. Category
- Paste Special
Customer Categories setting, Sales Ledger
- Each record in the old Contact Person register will be copied to a new record in the new Contact register. If you would like these new Contact records to be given a particular Customer Category, specify that Category here. This may help you distinguish Contact Persons from the Customers and Suppliers that are also in the Contact register.
- Empty Old Contacts Register when Ready
- Check this box if you want the function to delete the records in the old Contact Person register after copying them to the new Contact register. If you do not use this option, the records in the old Contact Person register will be marked as Closed.
- The function will first copy every Contact Person record into the Contact register, and then delete the old records. If the function fails because of a duplicate Contact Number as described in for the Start With Code field above, the Contact Persons that have been copied will not be deleted.
- If you do not use this option, you will be able to run the 'Convert Contact Persons to Contacts' Maintenance function again, resulting in duplicate Contact Person records in your Contact register.
