A question came in regarding the default behavior of Infuse relative to account creation.  How does an account get created by Infuse?

By default, the CRM account records are sent over to SL when the Record type flag is set to Customer. If the account number field is blank, this would be considered a new customer and an account number will be generated by the system. If the account already exists then an update will be performed on the record in SL. 

When a new customer is loaded into SL, by default the AR clerk would then notify the sales person or go into CRM and manually update the corresponding record in CRM with the correct account number. Then the system creates an xreference record internally and the updates become bidirecitonal. This behavior seems odd.  But it is very well thought out. It is done because most customers did not want SL to create new records in CRM by default because most likely a record already exists in CRM for that account. So if the integration automagically did, we would be creating a duplicate account. We don't like dupes in CRM.    

Initially this seem goofy to most people.  Why not just create an account in CRM automatically when it gets created in SL?   The reason this is done is because the customer record usually exists in CRM first so if the Customer record creation automatically creates an account in CRM you would have duplicate accounts.   And that is not good for anyone.

Some companies want to have the integration automatically create a customer record in CRM so DTS 1 can be turned off and DTS 2 can be modified to make this happen by changing the update step to update/insert, and modifying the source query to include the letter "h" in the  syncstatus1 in('Z', 'N') clause at the end of the query.

We have about 5 different methods that can be supported: some where no customers are created in CRM and everything is started in SL, some where everything is started in CRM, some with manual processes, some where the account number is automatically generated. It is CRITICAL that this process be defined prior to any integration being built, because there are many variables that come into the mix. This is usually a struggle because most companies do not have this process defined as specifically as we require so often this is more of a process discussion than a technical issue.  

Here is a diagram of one of our client's customer creation processes. This was for a publicly-traded company so they had a compliance issue with the integration automagically creating SL accounts.  So their auditors required that a AR Clerk physically type the record into SL. So this is how we addressed that issue.