Anyone know if National Accounts can be used for customer parent/child relationships WITHOUT affecting anything else…e.g. financial, reporting, etc…?
Or if I might need to do something custom instead?
Recently received a request at a site for storing simple parent/child relationships for their customers. I’ve not used National Accounts before and from reading I’ve done so far, still not quite sure of the full impact.
At my previous job, we looked at this before implementation. For some reason it would not work for us due to our customers being Global. Something with Global customers and National accounts just didn’t work. That was on 10.2.300 though, so a lot of that might have been fixed by now, but it may be an important item to look at if you are using Global customers.
Hi Bruce,
Yes, we use them solely for parent / child relationships for a few years now and I have not seen any adverse effect on any other programs or reports that we use. They have been helpful for both querying / reporting as well as a customization we put on the customer tracker that pulls in all order lines associated with a customer, thus getting parents and all children. We use a different “placeholder” customer record ID (20000’s vs 50000’s for children) method for the parent vs the children. Some children have no parent, for smaller companies. Our customer setup for parent and tracker customization looks like this, in case you are interested:
Nancy
Yes… Thanks much.
I’m wondering how this worked out for you?
I was looking at this feature for a very similar reason - to mark customers of ours that buy from our dealers but also buy from us directly. I was thinking we could add each dealer as a national account. Then they could order from us directly, but we could also see which dealers they ‘belong’ to.
(Hmm, testing in the pilot it looks like a customer can’t be a part of two national accounts of the same class… so this might not work for us…)
OK but the requirements in this case were really simple…
Just needed dummy “parents” as a way to group for reports, dashboards, etc…
Setup wasn’t exactly intuitive for end users but once they got past the first one, gets pretty straightforward. And as previously mentioned, ended up adding a few custom dashboards to help with visibility.
