Customer Searches

From NewHaven Software Wiki

Revision as of 21:34, 21 May 2014

The Customer Search (Find Customer) is used in a few sections of CMS and the code/search is the same in all of them. Here is a summary of how it works and some explanation of its behavior.

Settings

• The default criteria to search on is governed by a setting in Setup>Order Entry Option (e.g. last name, cust#, etc.)

• The results returned by a customer search are displayed in a standard format. You cannot choose which fields are displayed but you can drag and drop the columns or resize them. This will help the operator see the information that is most pertinent to them in finding the right customer.

Your grid manipulation will reset to the default display unless you have the workstation specific setting selected to 'save column order and width'. This setting is stored in the local registry, as are all workstation specific settings, so that user must have write permission to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NewHaven Software key.

The actual grid layout is stored in a file in the Windows directory (something we will be changing in the future) and the file is called savegrid.txt. This file is only referred to if the 'save column order' option is checked for this workstation.

Addresses

The mailing address is the customer's primary address. This is the address CMS uses in all searches. Typically the billing address is the same as the mailing address so it may appear CMS is searching on the billing but really it is the mailing.

For clarity, it is important to emphasize that the search is for a customer, not specifically an address. CMS does use the mailing address as the customer's primary address and thus any searches based on address (e.g. zip) would use the mailing address. That said, in the context of a searching for a customer in Order Entry's Shipping section, or a recipient in the Items section, when you retrieve the customer it will use the selected customer's shipping address if one is available.

At present there is no means of searching for a customer based on their shipping or billing address. You would have to find the customer based on their mailing address and, when retrieved it will populate that customer's address into the order as appropriate (populate using their shipping address when searching in Shipping, populate using their billing address when searching in Money.)

If you have CMS configured to save recipients as new customers, a recipient has only one address in the order (shipping) so when that recipient's customer record is created the shipping address from their originating order is used as the mailing, billing and shipping address. This means you should have a good chance of finding the recipient based on their shipping address unless their customer record was edited at some later date.

There is a feature in CMS to help your operators catch situations where the billing or shipping address is not the same as the mailing (often an indication of a customer record which was not properly/fully updated). More can be read about it here: http://updates.newhavensoftware.com/v522release_notes.htm#addr

Use

• Within a session, CMS will remember your last search results and display them again next time you bring up the customer search. It is quite common for the user to have selected the wrong customer. Displaying the same search results again makes it easy to choose another candidate without having to repeat the search.

• F2 can be used in Order Entry and Customers to bring up the Find Customer window. There are also Windows keyboard shortcuts, the Find Customer button and an option in the text menu under Customers.

• Name searches start in the last name field, the field you most likely will want to search on. You can optionally add a first name or zip code to further limit your results and can just use the tab key to navigate to them. Tab will go from last name to first name to zip.

• Use the Enter key to start the search or click Search.

• Tab key can be used to navigate into the grid for scrolling through results or use the scroll bar.

• To select a customer, double-click or highlight and click Select.

Tips

• Wild card searches are supported but not with an asterisk. Use the percentage % sign instead. e.g. %@yahoo.com to search for customers with a yahoo email address.

• CMS ignores spaces, punctuation, common prefixes like 'The', and the case of letters. "The Joe Trader Organization" can quickly and easily be found with a search on 'joet'.

• CMS automatically does a wild card search when no match can be found. If you search for Smithson and there are no Smithson matches, CMS will then search for Smithso, then Smiths and then Smith until the search yields results.

Advanced

This article explains various standard search techniques that CMS can support - http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_wildcards.asp