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ISTech Support Forum
http://www.istechforum.com/YaBB.pl Evo-ERP and DBA Classic >> Sales >> New contacts - how do they work? http://www.istechforum.com/YaBB.pl?num=1335887147 Message started by David Waldmann on 05/01/12 at 08:45:47 |
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Title: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/01/12 at 08:45:47 I think the concept is great, but I don't know if our conversion to the new system was flawed, or we don't have them set up right, or if there is some kind of problem. Here is an example: In the Contacts screen from AR-A, we see 5 contacts - two with email addresses. When we email a form, the two contacts with emails are shown, but each of those has 9 additional lines with just the name, no email. You wouldn't even know the second one was there unless you accidentally PageDown a couple times. Here is the contacts screen: http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c275/dwaldmann/IS%20Tech/Contacts.png And here is what we see when we do a lookup in the email utility: http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c275/dwaldmann/IS%20Tech/email.png |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Lynn_Pantic on 05/01/12 at 10:17:58 It is because each contact can have up to 10 email addresses. I have already asked Allen to suppress the ones that are not populated. Strange thing is, I only see this sometimes, not always so I need to pay more attention & determine when I do and when I don't, a pattern will make it easier to resolve. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/01/12 at 11:18:57 I'll keep an eye out and see if I can spot a trend. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by NovaZyg on 05/01/12 at 13:42:00 I think I fixed it. "BZ" Binary Zeros in the email addresses The code had a check to see if the email field was <> '' but if there was a BZ in the field then it would not be blank and therefor show up in the list. I sent a fix to Lynn today. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/02/12 at 04:17:03 Sorry - still having the same issue after installing the updated nzemailtll. Just to make sure, I even tried entering a new Quote in case something is cached somewhere. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/02/12 at 07:04:13 This may be related. I was trying to figure out an issue with sending email from AR-A and found this. Even though there are many email addresses in Contacts, not a one is showing up in the drop-down when you click the email button. I am using the new nzemailtll file so I don't know if that's part of the problem. I have another customer with similar configuration/quantity of Contacts, and get just 1 email address in the drop-down. All customers that I checked that have only one address seem ok. http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c275/dwaldmann/IS%20Tech/Untitled-1.png |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 05/02/12 at 07:38:37 The entire CO system does not make sense to me. so each "Contact" has 10 phones? 10 emails? 10 Misc?????? ?????? BTW, there is another programming problem here each time we hit the CO button it adds a record to that table. The only way to stop it, was to add a contact for each customer (DO NOT USE) anyways, this is what we have http://www.umcorp.com/john/co_01.JPG and http://www.umcorp.com/john/co_02.JPG :-X Kelloggs |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/02/12 at 09:39:17 Kelloggs wrote:
Agreed, but I thought maybe I just don't understand the proper setup. Maybe it works better when starting from scratch than when converting from Classic Contacts....? There are a couple issues I'm having just trying to figure out how you're supposed to use it - maybe once I do I can tell if it's broke or not. For one, and this is more a Feature related issue, why, when you Exit out of editing (or adding) a Contact, it goes back to the main customer screen, not the grid that shows the Contacts. Next, the info on the Grid does not always correspond with what's shown when you Edit Contact. For instance, in the example below, the contact I select in the Grid shows no name, but an email and phone. When I "select" or edit it, I see Name, but no email or phone. http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c275/dwaldmann/IS%20Tech/Untitled.png |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 05/02/12 at 10:33:12 David, If you don't mind, could you please go to Maintain Database and open the BKCMACCN table. Do you see records without a customer code??? That can not be!!!! no wonder..... :P Kelloggs |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/02/12 at 10:41:08 Just had one. I notice them occasionally as blank Customers in AR-A or Contacts in CM-A, and usually go in to delete them but hadn't recently. I think it happens when someone starts to create a new customer/contact but doesn't complete it, but there must be some common feature that I haven't figured out as it doesn't always happen when you abort. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 05/02/12 at 10:44:29 so it is happening to others thanks!!! :) |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/15/12 at 07:47:12 Another issue - it seems you can't edit or delete a "contact" that does not have a name. If you double-click it, the edit screen comes up with the Primary Contact in the Name field and NO email or phone... Also, the multiple blank lines, I think, has been partially fixed. It seems ok in SO-B, SO-C, SO-F and ES-D, but not SO-P-B. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 05/15/12 at 09:10:55 Just had another anomaly. On the below screen only the bottom line is correct. All the rest are from Customer 1200. It's pulling the email addresses from another customer, but saying they have the current Customer ID and phone number. http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c275/dwaldmann/IS%20Tech/Incorrectcontacts.png |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by SarahM on 06/04/12 at 08:09:52 We are having the same problems with CO. 1. The email lookup is case-sensitive, and when we update the addresses to match our convention, they still pull up the old way in email lookup, even though within CO it is updated. This is making it more cumbersome to search, because some addresses were originally entered in all caps, all lower case, etc. 2. CM-A lists a non-primary contact on the main screen, even though there is another primary contact listed in CO. 3. There are a lot of contacts being duplicated in CO somehow. When we try to delete the duplicates, the main contact deletes as well. Has there been any resolution to these problems? |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 08/07/12 at 09:05:58 We have similiar issues. Customers contacts are duplicating same name contact information. We tried once to pull out the data, clean up the file and then re-loaded the BKCMACCN file as directed. It's back to the same issues. Having so many of the same contacts makes it complicated when others trying to select the right contact to email. Has there been a bug fix for this problem? |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by SarahM on 08/07/12 at 09:08:16 I've never gotten a response on this at all. It continues to be a problem for us too. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 10/24/12 at 13:26:16 Does anyone know if the new update fixed the email contact problem with duplications? We currently are on update 5/25/12 - we will be moving to the latest one this weekend. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 01/22/13 at 09:22:18 We also have many problems with the contact system. Seems like it hasn't mattered what we have done, the CM file always is a mess. Duplicate contacts and contacts that don't belong everywhere. Hoping for a solution. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 01/22/13 at 10:20:04 EVO TECH SUPPORT - has there been any resolution to the duplications in the contact lists? We can work around this issue but it would be nice to get fixed. Especially in our environment when someone wants to send an email that hasn't used this much, gets confused on the numerous selections listed. Hope to see a fix soon! |
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Title: duplications of contacts in EVO Post by TwinOaks on 02/12/13 at 14:17:24 There still has not been anyone from EVO IT support responding on the issues of contact information duplicating. Now our system is actually putting other contacts into another company file. We cleaned up and fixed once. Now it is back - we don't want to have to keep exporting and importing data to keep clean. I see other EVO users have been having these issues. Can we get this fixed? |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 03/25/14 at 14:33:41 I know this is an old thread, but I'm hoping there's at least one person out there that says they are not having any problems with contacts. Its getting to the point its really hurting our business :( Not sure what the next steps are.... |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 03/26/14 at 05:02:16 We are still having some problems, but they are rare. Once thing we noticed the other day, and I don't know if it was coincidental or not, but we attempted to send an email from Evo to a customer that didn't have an email address set up, and the lookup in the email form showed emails from a different customer. I'm wondering if blanks somehow mess it up... |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 03/26/14 at 06:11:08 David, thanks for the feedback.... That might be the one thing that makes sense. We often do not have email address in the CM when we go to send an email and manually put it in. Maybe this might be the connection. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 03/26/14 at 06:55:43 We finally got our cleaned up but we had to update to the latest update (2013.4) and loaded all the patches available (SM-V). Then Support helped me export and delete all the duplications. It's fixed now and we have not had any duplications. I can provide you the instructions - but it might be best for IT Support to send you the export file and instructions how for you to clean up. Are you on the latest update and have installed all the latest patches? Good Luck!! Camille |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 03/26/14 at 07:20:07 I'm on all the latest and greatest. I love the new patch feature, I wish they would place a little, brief explanation on what was changed with the updated program. It would be nice to know if it was a problem that we had been experiencing or not. Do you have any blank email address? |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 03/26/14 at 08:13:33 I agree the patch info is much better and info on changes would be helpful. We didn't have many issues with "blank" emails just duplicated and put customers on the wrong list. Did you look at your BKCMACCN file in "maintain database"? You might be able to clean up in that area... |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 03/26/14 at 10:03:55 Camille, I'm glad to hear that its working well for you. BKCMACCN is a mess, the number of duplicates is kind of insane. I think that file has grown to over 15,000 lines. |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by TwinOaks on 03/26/14 at 10:09:44 I would suggest you get intouch with Lynn or other EVO Support and get your file exported out and cleaned up and then put back....ours was huge too. Good luck!!! |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 06/25/15 at 10:47:25 There are still issues with this. The duplicates are merely annoying, but getting an email address into a contact from a totally different customer is totally unacceptable IMO. We are a small enough company that, when we are manually emailing, we can notice that the first one is wrong, and pick the right one. However, in a larger company, or if you want to AutoSend (which I am in the process of trying to set up) it would be disastrous. Where is the fix??? |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by BurrKing_Mfg on 06/25/15 at 11:07:42 David, Knock on wood..... We have been good for months now. No more duplicates. We are clean and I haven't seen or heard of any contact popping up in the wrong places. Back in February worked with Lynn and Mike and we were able to duplicate one of the issues where contact were being placed into other accounts. Since then we have been good |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 06/25/15 at 11:42:16 James, Thanks for the info and further detail by phone/email. Will try to update for the board what we did and how it's working. Best, |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 06/25/15 at 13:02:28 We clean our tables daily with an script and have our own system to select the proper email. Here is our little system We select the email by editing the Customer Contact Information Enter "I" on the Primary Contact Field. On the Print window, once you have selected email We check mark "Use Contact Prim Code" and Enter "I" Where "I" stands for "Invoice", you can have "P" for Packing List, etc etc etc work like magic..... Here is how we keep our tables clean DELETE FROM BKCMACCN WHERE ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_CODE))) = 0;" DELETE FROM BKCMACCN WHERE ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_PRIM))) = 0 AND ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1))) = 0 AND ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_CON))) = 0;" DELETE FROM BKCMACCN WHERE ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_PRIM))) = 0 AND ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1))) = 0;" DELETE FROM BKCMACCN WHERE BKCM_ACCN_PRIM = 'Y' AND BKCM_ACCN_CON = 'PRIMARY CONTACT' AND BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = 'N/A';" UPDATE BKCMACCN SET BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = 'N/A' WHERE BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = '.F.';" Have fun .... :D Kelloggs |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 06/26/15 at 05:12:56 Kelloggs wrote:
Yes, that is the same principle we used to set up our contacts. However, during more extensive testing we found it wasn't necessary to use the letter codes UNLESS there is a different person for one type of document than another. For instance, if you have a customer that has only one contact and/or one email address for the entire company, you can leave the Primary field as blank or Y, and still put your I or S in the print dialog. If there is no matching primary code it just uses the first email address it finds. The biggest trouble I had in coming up with a strategy is figuring out how to process orders when some people get emailed invoices and some don't. This is primarily because of two factors -
So, what I've done is create customer classes that specify first of all whether a customer gets emailed docs or not, and then whether the customer is a Cash account or Net X Day account. To allow any combination to be entered in alphabetical order (to use the Class filter in print docs options) I had to use a two letter code, i.e. MC for Mail/Cash and M/A for Mail/Net X Days. So the process is (BTW, we print Pick Lists for every order as it comes in, when the order is ready to ship - sometimes the same day, sometimes not for weeks - it's turned in to order processing/shipping):
I actually have two codes for those with Net X Day accounts - one for "normal" ones, and one for those that get weekly emailed statements. So, weekly, we email EW (Email, Weekly) AutoSend to Code S. Monthly, we print MA (Mail, Net X Day) to printer, and mail. Then print EA (Email, Net X Day) to email, AutoSend Code S. One other thing to note. We are in the process of doing away with our normal fax line because we are converting to Hosted PBX on VoIP. So we will be using an Fax-2-Email (F2E) service. It's really cool how it works for sending from Evo. You enter an email address to the Contact using their fax number, i.e. 19998887777@faxservice.com and it gets treated in Evo as if they have an email address. Evo sends the email with attachment and the F2E service converts the email header, subject and body as a cover page, and the attachment as content pages. The receiver has no idea that it came from an email other than the fact that the bottom of the cover page has the name of the fax service on it. Note that if you have no subject or body in the email no cover page is sent, so if you send a lot you may want to set up a user that has a profile without that since the F2E services charge by the page (or - up to X pages). I like MetroFax at $8/month for up to 500 pages. I think we are going to get rid of our postage meter if we can get the Contacts cleaned up and use Evo the way we should be able to. I figure we will be sending 5% or less of our invoices/statements by snail mail because we have an email address or fax number for almost everyone. I figure we should be able to save at least $3000 per year between postage, envelopes, paper and meter rental. Kelloggs wrote:
Can that be run in Preview mode to see what's going to happen? Because I'm afraid that will delete some things I don't want deleted; for instance, we have quite a lot of legitimate contacts that have no Primary code and no email address - if I'm interpreting the script correctly it would delete those(?) Of course, I would make sure I had a good backup first but I don't like relying on those... |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 06/26/15 at 06:40:07 Yes, you can "preview" the query results change the DELETE FROM to SELECT * FROM DELETE FROM BKCMACCN WHERE ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_CODE))) = 0;" SELECT * FORM BKCMACCN WHERE ASCII(LTRIM(RTRIM(BKCM_ACCN_CODE))) = 0;" :P Kelloggs |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by Kelloggs on 06/26/15 at 06:46:21 This one UPDATE BKCMACCN SET BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = 'N/A' WHERE BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = '.F.'; would be: SELECT * FROM BKCMACCN WHERE BKCM_ACCN_EMAIL_1 = '.F.'; As an extra precaution run all the queries on your play company. Enjoy ;D Kelloggs |
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Title: Re: New contacts - how do they work? Post by David Waldmann on 07/30/15 at 06:25:00 An update David Waldmann wrote:
I don't know if the program was updated, but when we tried going live with it we found the above is NOT TRUE. If there is no matching Primary code it puts in the Auto email failure address (if you've set one up). In preface, I should say that I had previously spent hours upon hours using Maintain Database to clean up duplicate Contacts (as many as 50 or more in some cases IIRC) and contacts assigned to the wrong company. I suppose the duplicates could probably have been eliminated with some script, and/or exporting and cleaning up in Excel, then reinitializing the table and reimporting, but you'd still have to find the bad links. It was pretty easy to find them among the duplicates, where almost all of them were. So I spent most of a day selecting and exporting contacts (I used CR) and extensive use of Formulas and Subtotaling, Sorting and Filtering with Excel to prepare new files to import*.
The important thing is that I now have and "I" contact to send Invoices for everyone that has an email (or fax # that I've made into and email address), and all our Net X days customers also have an "S" contact for Statements. The only thing I'm not real thrilled with is that I ended up Appending any additional contacts needed, so some customers (about 100) have a duplicate [blank] or [Y] contact in addition to the I and S ones. I'm sure I could run a script of some sort to clean them up, but it's not that big of a deal. Anyways, I think I am finally there. We are using it today for Invoices, and Monday will be another big test with Statements. BTW, I believe there were only about 10 Net X Day customers that we don't have a fax or email address for (and they are very low frequency), so I expect the USPS is going to be getting a LOT less of our $$. ;D David Waldmann wrote:
Per fellow user Burr King, I found out that if you put {nocoverpage} in your signature the F2E service eliminates the cover page. Pretty slick. Would be even slicker if Evo did HTML mail - you could make the text white so it couldn't be seen... One last note. Probably most of you who've played with this already know, but for some reason I didn't figure it out until yesterday. When you click Email in the print dialog the box comes up asking how you want to send the email. I was under the mistaken assumption that the "Use Contact Name" and "Use Contact Number" were only valid selections if "Auto Send Email" was checked off. They're not! So, you can still select "Use Contact Number" and put in the "I" or "S" but NOT check off "Auto Send". This will allow you to see what it wants to use, and make adjustments if necessary. So for now we are not going to Auto Send, until we've tested for a while and make sure it all works the way we expect it to. Of course, now that we've gone through all that, they will probably enable the checkboxes... *I used the T7GENIMP utility. A couple of tips - the only required fields for this purpose are Customer ID, Email Address and Primary Code. I also assigned a Contact of "Statement" to the S code contact and "Invoice" to the I code one. Two notes related to that -
Hope this helps someone have a bit less pain than me. If anyone has any questions about any of this, please let me know - I'd be glad to help. |
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