Customer Name vs Company Name
Hi,
When using a client that has a company name, we would like all the information on our screen to be the owners surname and the only time the company name is used is when printing invoices.
Currently the default is the company name. Is there a way to change it in the archetype?
Re: Customer Name vs Company Name
It would also be useful to be able to search on the owner's surname, not just the company name. If Oliver Wendell Douglas (who trades under his farm name of Greenacres), rings to make an appointment for Eleanor or Alice, he will not be found under a search of "doug", only under "gree". Staff that have been employed for a while and have dealt with accounts receivables can often link a face with a name and company name or even a voice on the phone, but new staff cannot and so search with name given to them by the customer. Since less than 5% of customers have company names, it is not appropriate to direct staff to ask everyone their company name.
Can the display be changed using node 'name' in party.customerperson.adl? Can we change the order of the concatination components and deal with reports separately with sql queries or jxpath functions? Will this affect the search?
By corollary, if Lisa [Douglas] rings, because Oliver is on the tractor, is there a way to find that customer by searching by contact?
Regards, Mary
Simon Slater
Registered Linux User #463789 @ http://linuxcounter.net
Re: Customer Name vs Company Name
Customer searches are done on the name field. This is derived from the company name if present, or the first and last name, if not.
Contact searches are done on the description field, so entering 'Lisa' in the 'Select Customer - Contact' field is not likely to yield what you expect.
To allow searches on either the customer name or company name, you could change the name field to be a concatenation of both the customer name and company name.
This:
Re: Customer Name vs Company Name
You can change the Name node of the party.customerperson archetype to ignore the company name.
It's defined as follows:
The Derived Value field is responsible for generating the Name:
expr:ifempty(/details/companyName, concat(/details/lastName,',',/details/firstName))This can be changed to:
concat(/details/lastName,',',/details/firstName)There are a couple of issues with this:
1. It will prompt you to update the Name of every customer. This may take a long time, and should thus be done out of hours.
2. Any searches on a company name won't turn up any results.
Re: Customer Name vs Company Name
Perfect, thanks Tim. Our system is going a bit slow at the moment so I will wait until we upgrade our server and do at the same time. Bit worried that this might tip it over the edge.