The following update is interesting for the IT administrators of all those companies who synchronize portatour® Anywhere with their existing ERP/CRM system via the API.
In addition to the “Portatour ID”, which is assigned automatically to each customer record by portatour®, you can now add an “External ID” to each customer. Typically, you will use the customer record ID from you existing ERP/CRM system.
The ID fields (Portatour ID, External ID) can be used together or individually in order to enable a clear assignment of imported data records to existing customers during subsequent data update imports. Of course you can still use custom fields as keys for data update imports. However, using the new field “External ID” offers the following differences:
- Just like for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also guarantees for the “External ID” that no duplicate IDs do exist in a user’s database. Custom fields do not offer this validation.
- As for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also prohibits the subsequent modification of the “External ID”. Thus, once the “External ID” has been set for a customer, it remains stable and can neither be changed via the user interface nor via an import or the API.
- The “External ID” is displayed in gray on the bottom right of the customer detail page. This enables a better identification of customers, especially for support cases within your company.
- The “External ID” must not be longer than 40 characters and only allows letters, numbers, and the following special symbols: ‘-‘, ‘_’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘.’
- The “External ID” is case sensitive, i.e. the ID “ABC123” does not equal “abc123”.
- By knowing a customer’s “External ID” you also know the URL of the customer’s detail page in portatour®. It is https://my.portatour.net/a/Customers/Details/H<ExternalID>. You replace <ExternalID> with the data record’s “External ID”, e.g. https://my.portatour.net/ a/Customers/Details/Habc123 in the case of “abc123”. This allows directly linking to customers in portatour® from you existing system.
We recommend to import a customer’s “External ID” immediately during the first import. To do so, simply assign the respective field in the import assistant.
In case you already have customers in portatour® and want to add an “External ID”, then carry out an “update import” during which you use an existing field (e.g. customer number or Portatour ID) as a key field and at the same time allocate the field “External ID”.
Be careful when allocating “External IDs” as they cannot be changed retrospectively. In case you make a mistake, you can only go to “Options” and select “Delete data > External ID” and thus remove the “External IDs” from all the data records of the user.
Conclusion
You decide whether you want to use the “External ID” or not. The “External ID” offers a stricter handling of keys. A preview of the coming portatour® updates makes the use of the “External ID” highly attractive though: We are currently working on the possibility to import appointments. The “External ID” will make it easy to implement the relation between appointments and customers.