From late September 2014, you can now update the "Employer" field on a person record using the Import tool and selecting the "Update existing records" Import mode.

Step 1: Prepare Your Source File

The "Employer" field in Workbooks is a linked field and displays the Organisation record data currently stored on your database. You'll need to provide Workbooks with either an Organisation name or Object Reference so that you can look up a record and then populate the Employer field. In this example, I am going to use the name because I know that I only have one Organisation with the name "Workbooks" on my database.

NOTE: If you have duplicate Organisations on your database with the same name, then the update will fail with the message "Found more than one Employer with the Organisation name =XXX" because Workbooks doesn't know which record to select. Taking this into account, it's recommended that you use the Object Reference as this will ensure that only one record is found.

Step 2: Mapping Fields to your Source File

Using the Import wizard, choose a "People" import and select your data file. On Stage 3 of the import wizard, you are required to set up your field mappings as required. If you are unsure how to do this, see here.

For the Employer field mapping, there is an additional layer of complexity to lookup the Organisation record. You'll see a small black arrow beside the employer field which means that you are looking up another record type.

Ensure that you have selected the correct column from your source file. Next, within the "Linking Rule" section choose a field to match on, this will be either the Organisation Name or the Object Reference field as per Step 1. You can setup the mapping to reject if there isn't a match, case sensitive match or you can match on multiple fields if you need to. For most users, matching on multiple fields shouldn't be necessary to complete this task but it does depend on the condition of your Workbooks data.

Under the "Update Settings" section, you can configure the Import further:

• Only update the field if it is blank - If the person record already has a value in the "Employer" field then no update will occur.
• Do not overwrite if source data is blank - this option will stop the Import setting the "Employer" field to blank where there might already be a value.

Step 3: Choosing the Import mode

The import mode for this task should be set to "Only Update Existing Records" because we only intend to update People records that are already in Workbooks and we want to link them to an Organisation record.

NOTE: You can do a mixture of updating and creating in the same import by selecting "Update existing records and create new ones".

The final step is to choose a field to look up the people records that already exist in Workbooks. For this example, I'm using the Person Name field. Bear in mind that as before with the Organisation records, if you have multiple People with the same name on your database, the update will fail with a similar message highlighted in Step 1. Thus it is recommended that you use the Person Object Reference instead. I'm using a relatively small database that doesn't have any duplicates so for the purposes of this example, I am using the Person name. Click "Run" when you are happy to begin the import.

Once the import is finished, remember to re-visit the Import wizard, check any changed records and then click "Approve" if you are happy with the changes or "Reject" if you are not. This will help to mitigate any future data issues.