By default Order Importer will compare either the SageAccount or CustomerID values of the imported order data against the Sage customer/supplier list, if a customer/supplier within Sage is using an account reference matching the imported value Order Importer considers that customer/supplier a match.
If a value for SageAccount is included in the import data it will take priority over the CustomerID value.
You can override this default behaviour by specifying multiple fields to compare; all targeted sage customer/supplier fields must match the associated imported data to be considered as a match.
To do this edit the job using the Job Wizard and click on the "Advanced Options" button and navigate to the "Customer / Supplier Match Rules" tab.
To add a match rule use the bottom row of the table and select the import field from the left column and select the Sage field from the right column.
Please be aware that if you use match rules in place of the default settings it can impact Order Importers performance.
Typically when Order Importer creates a new customer account in Sage it will use the imported CustomerID value as the new customer/supplier account reference, however when using match rules it is assumed that the imported CustomerID is not desired.
When using match rules Order Importer will auto generate the new account reference similar to the way Sage does when adding a new customer/supplier.
When it is determined that a new customer/supplier account should be added to Sage the account reference will be created based on the following rules:
The account reference will be made up of 4 characters from the company name or contact name; these will be followed by a numeric value.
The first 4 characters are taken from the first 4 characters of the company name, if no company name is available the first 4 characters from the last word of the contact name are used, effectively the first 4 characters of the surname.
Then a numeric value of 1 is added to the end of the account reference and Sage is checked for existing customer accounts, while an account exists in sage the numeric portion of the account reference is incremented by 1 each time till no existing account is found. This gives us a new account reference that is available to use for the new customer account.
Account references in Sage have a maximum character count of 8, so this approach to creating account references will allow 9999 unique account references for a given company/contact name. For example multiple customers with a surname of Jones would be:
JONE1, JONE2, JONE3 and so on right up to JONE9999.
If your not using match rules Order Importer will simply use the imported CustomerID rather than generating account references.