[Devin Dukes]

Hi all,

I'm trying to make sure our business contacts are in RE correctly, and am running into some challenges with our database. When the conversion was done here from Excel to RE, for some reason our business contacts were brought in as separate constituents, and the business address is identified as the home address. So, as it stands now:

There is a constituent record for the business, with the business address. There are no contacts designated for the businesses.

There is a constituent record for the business contact, but that person is not identified as a contact for that business, and the business address is identified as the home address

Some of these constituents have additional records for their actual home addresses, linked to their spouse. There is no link or reference to the other record that only contains the business address, though I have identified many through the duplicate search.

I have some thoughts on how to do this, but would love to hear how others would tackle and repair this one.

Thanks!

[Matthew]

1. Export the following information from the business records: import id, org name, address fields
2. Export the following information from the individual records: constit id, name, address fields.
3. Match up the individuals with the businesses, using the address information, if necessary. ((You can probably use a tool from Excel add-ins, free add-ons for Microsoft Excel 2007, 2003 - 2000 to make that quick and relatively painless.))
4. Create an import file that has the constit id, and imports the primary business relationship to the correct business and make sure to include the contact, employee, and primary business fields with Yes in the column for each. (You do this by importing the business's import ID as the ORlink field in the import file.) Refer to Knowledgebase solution # 24422 for help on creating the import file.
5. In Admin--Import, you're going to use a Organization Relationship Import. (Also, FYI, if you go there and select Organization Relationship Import, you can select the help file link at the bottom of the screen for help on creating the import file).

This will get your contacts linked with correct businesses.

to fix their home addresses:

1. Using a constituent export, export constit id, Address Import ID for the existing Home address, Address Type for the existing Home address, and spouse address information from the individual records.
2. Match up the Spouse address with the address import ID for the existing Home address, and use this as a constituent address import file to update the contact's records.

If you have questions about specific steps, post them and I'll try to be more detailed where necessary.

Do others have a tidier solution or see something I've missed?

Thanks
Matthew

[dyednwool]

Matthew - Thanks for the great info.

I'm doing something similar right now but I'm also making sure that the newly imported contact relationships have the primary addressee & salutation so that might be some additional fields you want to bring in.