Hello Method Users!
Thank you for taking the time to read a new iteration of our weekly Method Blog posts. I’m fairly new to the Method blog, but as a member of the Community Support Team, you may have had the pleasure of speaking with me already ;)
Today, I will provide a 'How-To' on something that a few Method:CRM users have contacted Support about during setup: importing Customers and Contacts into Method:CRM using the built-in Method Import/Export tool.
It’s quite common for new Method Users to have a spreadsheet containing the Customers information they wish to bring into Method. Well, this is how to do it!
Customers and Contacts within Method
To begin, I want to touch on the relationship between Customers and Contacts within Method, as this will help you understand the process involved in importing your external lists.
Each Customer must be assigned a Contact - when you add a Customer from within Method, you’re also creating the main Contact for that customer at the same time! While it’s possible to have standalone Contacts in Method, it’s recommended that you assign any of these wayward Contacts to a Customer.
What this means is in order to import your Contacts into Method, you first need to import your Customers. If you currently have one giant list containing all your Customer/Contacts, it would be helpful to separate them into two lists: one for Customers, and one for Contacts.
Now Let’s Create and Import Some Customers!
To start, I will glance at the “New Customer” screen in Method to give me some hints on what fields are mandatory, and what other fields I might want to use when importing.
You can see above that we are required at minimum to include the Customer Name and Contact fields (note that the Customer Name field on the New/Edit Customer screen is actually the “Name” field in the Customer Table). With this information we can modify our Customer list to include all wanted and mandatory fields. Make note that I did this example for a QuickBooks Desktop account, if using QuickBooks Online, the “Contact” field is no longer mandatory, however “First Name” field would be.
Here is an example of our Customer Spreadsheet, for a Desktop account.
Now that we have created our Customer List, we can use the Method Import/Export tool to import this into the Customer Table (again, refer to this article on importing/exporting).
Awesome - we are done with our Customer List. Below is what my updated Customer grid looks like:
Now let’s tackle our Contacts.
To start, take a look at the Edit Contacts screen in order to figure out what fields are required, and what other fields we want to include when importing. Screen shot below:
As you can see from the above screenshot, the only mandatory field for a Contact is “Name”. You are probably thinking “Okay, so how would just adding a value to the “Name” field link my new Contact to an existing Customer?” That’s easy - it won’t. If you were to add a Contact from within Method using the New Contact screen, you would do it through a Customer record.
Because of this setup, Method has some magic going on in the background, linking your Contact to the Customer you already have open. What’s great is that this really isn’t magic: Method is simply writing to one additional field for each Contact in your Contacts Table, “Entity”. The “Entity” field for the Contacts table is actually the “Full Name” field from Customer table. If you take a look at the New/Edit Customer screen, this is the value at the top of the screen.
Side note: the “Full Name” field is actually the “Name” field from the Customer table, plus the value of the parent Full Name field. I am not going to expand on this right now, but it’s worth knowing if you will also be dealing with “Jobs of Customers”.
All right, let’s create our Contacts list.
Check out the image below: it’s an example of the mandatory fields, the magic field (Entity), and some other common Contact fields. Because I only created two Customers in the above step, I am importing these eight contacts to these two Customers:
When you are happy with your list, go to the Method Import/Export tool and import those Contacts (as you did with the Customer list earlier).
That’s it!
Hopefully you have wandered back to your Customers and Contacts List screen and noticed that your Records count at the bottom left-hand side of the grid has increased. If not, make sure to refresh your grid by using the refresh button at the bottom-right side of the grid.
I will mention one last item: although I didn’t discuss importing Leads into Method, the process is virtually identical to importing your Customers. The only difference when dealing with leads is that you must import your Customers List to the “Customer Leads” table when using the Import/Export Tool.
Thanks for dropping by! We hope you found this post useful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them as comments below, or you can always ask some questions through our
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