I received an 'Invalid prospect code HALTON on History Quote 2457' error after running DataCare. After checking, it seems that it was a quote for a prospect that was moved to history (we didn't get that job). Since then he has become a customer and was transferred over.

Is the only way of clearing the error either create a prospect file for him again (sort of defeats the purpose of transferring), or copying the quote(s) back from history, changing it from prospect to customer, and then copying it back to History? This doesn't enthuse me either. Lot of work for one quote but what if there had been eight or ten?? And if I'm maintaining a history, he wasn't a customer when that quote expired.

I decided to go the copy route to get rid of the error but it tells me there is no prospect, do I want to create one? So solution 1 - I have to create a prospect anyways. Not fun.

Ok, tried to create a prospect but the system won't allow it because a customer already exists with that number. Any ideas or am I going to have to live with DataCare errors?

SalesCQ 8.1C (121012)

Hi Mike,

I'm sorry for the frustration that you've run into with the historical prospect quote that gave an unfixable DIC error, that had to be manually adjusted. And you are correct that you cannot create a prospect code that already has the same value for a customer.

We can't have the integrity check make these changes (as the prospect could have been deleted, rather than transferred to a customer), but I've passed along your concerns to development in regards to the process when a prospect gets turned into a customer and what to do with outstanding and historical quotes. This scenario was on our radar when quotes was first added to SalesCQ in 2008, but this is the first report of someone having a 'rejected' prospect quote get caught because that propsect later became a customer for a different quote.

To address this, I would suggest creating a 'dummy' prospect that has a similar but not identical code as HALTON (maybe HALTN2), move the history quote to current, assign it to this 'dummy' prospect, move it back to history, and finally make the 'dummy' prospect inactive.

Mike:

If you have Toolkit and if you would like all of the records attached to the correct current customer then I think this will work (not tested):

1. Create a 'dummy' prospect that has a similar but not identical code as HALTON (maybe HALTN2), move the history quote to current, assign it to this 'dummy' prospect.

2. Use Toolkit to merge HALTN2 into HALTON.

3. Now move the quote back to history.

Support:
Mike, being a thorough sort of fellow, had previously searched and found this posting back in 2009: SalesCQ posting in 2009. It's the same set of circumstances. I think the idea of having the Prospect-to-Customer process update all Quotes (current and historical) would work well.

This error occurs regardless of where the quote is - quotes or history. Now I did create a dummy prospect, copied the offending quote to it and deleted the original, and then copied it back to history under the original customer. What really has me confused is this quote was from June 2012 and they have been a customer since July 2012. Now I know I have run DataCare at least a few times since then and it is just showing up now. (This must have to do with my system).

But as I was saying to Bruce, I can't see that this hasn't occurred with someone else (other than the one other thread). Is this just a case of balancing complaints against work involved to fix it?

I agree with Bruce's solution - having the Prospect-to-Customer process update all Quotes (current and historical).

Thanks

Mike, I have the same problem as well. When a prospect becomes a customer, we create the customer with an new customer number. Then I remake the prospect with the original prospect number when datacare give me the error.

Mike/Doug:

Best option for now:

Change prospect to customer without changing the code, then use toolkit to change the customer code.

Hopefully SOftrak could look into ths becasue I would agree with you that you should be able to do this without creating a problem.