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Lesley Quintero
What are the risks of using "Customer Name" as External ID?
The records I am tasked with uploading from an external report are Master-Detail. They details are called "loads" and the masters are the "customer accounts". Each of the detail (load) records have a unique number, so I'm good there. However, the master customer accounts do not have any unique identifiers (no customer or account numbers), aside from the customer name.
I believe the upserts will need to be run weekly, and there will be around 15K loads to run, plus any new customer accounts. I know I need external IDs for both the loads and the customer accounts. I want to avoid having the company keep track of customer numbers on their end, so I'm wondering if it would work for me to create a "Customer Name" field and use the customer name as the External ID.
I recognize that the customer name would be in two places in Salesforce:
1) The standard Salesforce account name field which doesn't allow me the option to make it an external ID field
and
2) My custom "Customer Name" that I would make an external ID field. I would hide this field to avoid confusion for the reps, so they would only see the standard Account Name field.
I recognize in doing this, I would need to have both columns in my CVS file. It would be easy to maintain on the cvs, as I could just copy/past the column that contains the Customer Name on the spreadsheet into a new column for the external IDs. The information would be the same, but the cvs headers and Salesforce fields would not.
In short it would look like this:
CSV Colums
Customer Name - (ABC, Inc.) - mapped to Salesforce standard Account Name field (visible)
Custom Name External ID - (ABC, Inc.) - mapped to Salesforce custom External ID field (hidden)
The report that is generated is standard, so the customer names should not change. Regardless, I would set them to case insensitive since they are names.
Would this work? What is the potential fall out from it? Is there a better way to avoid my customer having to track External IDs that they don't already have assigned in their other database?
I know it's a lot. Any suggestions are much appreciated.
I believe the upserts will need to be run weekly, and there will be around 15K loads to run, plus any new customer accounts. I know I need external IDs for both the loads and the customer accounts. I want to avoid having the company keep track of customer numbers on their end, so I'm wondering if it would work for me to create a "Customer Name" field and use the customer name as the External ID.
I recognize that the customer name would be in two places in Salesforce:
1) The standard Salesforce account name field which doesn't allow me the option to make it an external ID field
and
2) My custom "Customer Name" that I would make an external ID field. I would hide this field to avoid confusion for the reps, so they would only see the standard Account Name field.
I recognize in doing this, I would need to have both columns in my CVS file. It would be easy to maintain on the cvs, as I could just copy/past the column that contains the Customer Name on the spreadsheet into a new column for the external IDs. The information would be the same, but the cvs headers and Salesforce fields would not.
In short it would look like this:
CSV Colums
Customer Name - (ABC, Inc.) - mapped to Salesforce standard Account Name field (visible)
Custom Name External ID - (ABC, Inc.) - mapped to Salesforce custom External ID field (hidden)
The report that is generated is standard, so the customer names should not change. Regardless, I would set them to case insensitive since they are names.
Would this work? What is the potential fall out from it? Is there a better way to avoid my customer having to track External IDs that they don't already have assigned in their other database?
I know it's a lot. Any suggestions are much appreciated.