Tips for Syncing Salesforce with Quickbooks Series (Part 2 of 5)
As I mentioned in my previous post, I initially worked with Avankia’s DBSync a couple of years ago as a Salesforce (SF) administrator integrating our company’s Quickbooks (QB) with our Salesforce data and over the past couple of months I have been re-introduced to it as a Salesforce consultant working with clients who wish to do the same.
This is part 2 of a series of 5 blog posts that I will be posting on custom field mapping, formulas, and tips that you may find useful during your DBSync integration project. In this post I’ll be specifically addressing tips for Contact to Customer syncing.
This article is part 2 is a series of 5, which include:
- Contact to Customer syncing
- Item to Product syncing
- Opportunity to Sales Order syncing
- Invoice to Invoice syncing
For Part 2 I want to look at a quick and simple workaround related syncing Salesforce Contacts to QuickBooks. The default mapping that DBSync includes as part of its bi-directional process maps that basically syncs a QuickBooks’ Primary Contact/Email fields for a customer with the associated Salesforce Account’s Contact record. The 2 problems I run into with this mapping are:
- Poor and unusable QB customer contact data. Because QB customer contact fields have no real validation, it’s extremely common for users to enter incomplete or multiple names, names with numbers, phone numbers with extensions or names, etc., etc…, you get the point. This of course makes it very difficult to update contact records in SF from this data, much less insert a new contact record.
- In SF, users must check the “is Primary” check-box for a contact in order for it to sync with QB.
Here are the basic steps involved:
- The first thing I do is make the client understand that none of the contacts listed under the QuickBooks’ Customer profiles are going to be created in Salesforce when it syncs.
- Modify the DBSync process maps to sync one-way from SF to QB by turning off the CustomerToAccount sequence that updates Contacts in Salesforce with QuickBooks contacts. This can be done using the “Quick Start” feature under the Profiles or by making the individual sequence steps Validation = False.
- Create a new custom lookup field in the Account object to lookup Contacts and label it “Billing Contact.”
- Create a new formula field (text) in the Account object that pulls in the First Name and Last Name of the above Contact and label it “Billing Contact Name.”
- Create a new formula field (email) in the Account object that pull in the Email of the above Contact and label it “Billing Contact Email.”
- Add the additional mapping to the AccountToCustomer process map in DBSync (see below) that maps these 2 fields from the SF Account object to the QB Customer profile fields.
Stay tuned for the 3rd installment of Useful Tips for Syncing Salesforce With QuickBooks Using DBSync.
By Chris Mobbs, Acutedge Salesforce Consultant with hands-on experience in CRM administration and integration, accounting and controls, budgeting and forecasting, and policy and controls development.