In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the out of the box import tools have been greatly improved. Recently, I was working with a client to import their Accounts and Contacts from a spreadsheet. Best practice is to import your Accounts first and then import your Contacts. The reason behind this best practice is to allow the import process to associate the Contact to the Account. But while reviewing the data the client noticed that the primary contact field was not populated on the Account form. Since the contacts don't exist yet, there was no way to populate this field while importing the Accounts. Below is a simple way to work around this issue.
First create a new field in the contact entity, in my case I called it Primary Contact and set the field attribute to Two Options. You do not need to add this field to form, it simply needs to be available to update during the import.
After the field is created, create a new workflow that will use this new field to trigger the workflow. Make sure the workflow is set to be triggered when a "record is created".
The first step is to add a check condition to make sure the primary contact field equals "Yes"
If that value equal yes, then the workflow will update the Parent Customer field in the Account entity. You can do this by selecting the contact has the Primary Contact field.
The last step is to add a new column to your contact data spreadsheet. You can call this column "Primary Contact" and then you will need to set a value for each row.
Now when contacts are imported, the workflow will trigger and update the primary contact on the Account entity.
Let us know if you found this tip useful by commenting on the post. We often blog about solutions our CRM Experts devise with clients so make sure to subscribe to our Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog.
Happy CRM'ing!
Not the best way to do it..
You should research the zip functionality of the default import tool instead.. It does exactly what you are doibg in a workflow.. Just alot smarter..
Rune,
You are correct that you can now relate contacts and account via the import tool but the issue still exists if you have multiple contacts related to an account. But, in my example I have 5 contacts for one account. The import tool does not have a way to state which ones is the primary contact. So it pulls the first contact from the list and sets that as the primary contact. That will not work for my customer…. Also there is a ton of data manipulation you must do prior to getting the data to import in correctly.
Hope this clarifies things.
JoeCRM