Converting Addresses

Unfortunately, Quickbooks has a very strange way of handling address information which although it does make sense, causes external software a problem.

This is a very important topic to understand as it can cause a great deal of confusion when importing and exporting address information.

The Customer Name is the name you refer to the Customer and Vendor by in the lists. It cannot be changed by external software and no duplicates can exist.

When you add the Customer Name no extra address information is added to Quickbooks so the First and Last names are empty. However, because we cannot change the Customer Name we need to use the First Name and Last Name which do not exist in Quickbooks. We could of course try all sorts of means of splitting the names but everyone uses different methods of entering this Customer name so no algorithm would be reliable. The best thing we can do is to put the Customer Name into Last Name in Farriers Manager.

Having said that, if you enter a Company Name into Quickbooks and/or a First Name and Last Name then this is added to the address information as shown above. The problem is that when we read this address information we have no idea of telling what is actually in there. it could be a company name or a first/last name.

Another complication is that there is a bug in Quickbooks (that they refuse to fix!) in that if you have a Company Name in the address field and you change it in the relevant field at the top of the screen, the address field does not change.

As you will see there is a huge problem here in converting the address information so we have come up with this general set of rules. It is critical that you understand this. In simple terms, if a record comes in from Quickbooks with NO first and last name, when you pass the record back to Quickbooks we will complete those fields. However, as the name did not exist previously it will not make any difference to the way you work with Quickbooks but you need to be aware that this happens.

1.	If there is no first name AND no last name in Quickbooks then the customer name is added to Farriers Manager as last name and takes precedence over rules #1 and 2

2.	If the Company name exists in Quickbooks then that is added to Farriers Manager and takes precedence over rule #3

3.	If the address lines 1 and/or 2 in Quickbooks matches either the company name or first and last names in Quickbooks then address lines 1 and/or 2 are ignored. The remainder of the address lines are added to Farriers Manager as valid address lines.