Receivables 9.0A (090511)

Maintenance/Mark Customers Inactive offers only one option to find inactive customers with the field "Last Activity Date". Using last activity date Sept 1/08 this list produces about 60 customers for us. Using Inquiry/Customers and searching with Last Invoice Date or Last Payment Date less than Sept 1/08 AND Start Date less than Sept 1/08 the list produces 818 customers. This is a more accurate inactive list.

I have no idea where AR is coming up with the Last Activity Date. It often has no association with invoices/payments or credits. We have hundreds of customers on our system with no activity what-so-ever for more than a year, but have current activity dates. Many of them are Aug 17, 2009. That is probably the day that we updated to the new AR and our data was converted.

Is there a fix for this or do I have to resort to making each customer Inactive one at a time using Customer Maintenance?

Hi Susan

The Last Activity Date is updated whenever the customer master record is updated. This includes going into a customer's record and clicking OK (even if you don't make a change), posting a transaction to the customer's account, importing a customer record, or a change due to a database conversion. It is a fairly useless way of determining which customers should be marked inactive.

The best approach is to export to Excel the list of customers you want to weed out, including the dates you want to use as filters, and include the "Active?" field in the export. Change those you want to make inactive to F, and then import the list back.

Steve

Thanks Steve.

I guess there's no point to the "Maintenance/Mark Customers Inactive".

Hi, Susan,

As Steve says, the Last Activity Date reflects the date that the record was last changed. There are many types of changes, other than transactions, that constitute 'activity'. Clicking OK on any screen is like saying, yes, I want to do this, effect the change. Even if you haven't done anything that is visible to you, clicking okay does update the underlying record. It also updates the Last Maintenance Date, Time and User fields.

If you don't want a record updated, press Cancel or run a report that will provide the information you're looking for.

Hi Susan

I would state it differently - the "Maintenance/Mark Customers Inactive" function could be improved by using a filter other than Last Activity Date.

Steve

Softrak Support - No one clicked OK on these customers. We converted our data as required to update to AR 9.0A and it gave our customers a new Last Activity Date. Perhaps because Address 3 was moved to the City field when the data was converted? (Which was really slick btw.. almost all of customers converted perfectly to the new AR format).

However, since last activity date changes every time there's system maintenance on our Receivables customer base, the Maintenance/Mark Customers Inactive function is of no use for flagging inactive customers. I hope Softrak will consider changing this so that we can use last invoice date or last payment date or a comination of both.

Hi Susan (and Steve),

While it goes without saying that transaction posting should update the "last activity" date, what other activities should do so as well? How about entering a note, or changing a contact? Updating an address or phone number? What about moving transactions from current to history or sending a statement (which may generate an automatic note)?

As Steve pointed out, you can use GridView or the SmartFinder to generate a list of customers you'd like to inactivate. Just re-import the customer codes and default the Active flag to "False" in the import template.