This post is to help you correct views, where you find that a Person’s Employer field is blank on a Report or Campaign, even though when you click through to the Person Record the Employer field has in fact been populated.

The most common cause of this is Records being updated via an import where the Employer field was mapped on the Person Record and it was not Extended to the Employer - this means the relationship wasn’t created properly.

In order to repopulate the Employer field and create the relationship properly, we need to:

1. Firstly, identify all of the affected Records in the database
2. Update all of the People’s Employers by Import to a Dummy Organisation
3. Re-import the correct data by a second Import

How do you identify the affected Records?

Build a People Report that identifies all People where the Employer field is blank. 

• Include the following Columns:
  • Employer (main) > Name
  • Employer (main) > Organisation reference
  • Name
  • Person reference
• Include the following Criteria:
  • Employer (main) > Object reference is not blank
  • Employer is blank

Which will look like below:

This Report will identify all of the People whose details need updating, you will now need to Save and Run the Report in order for us to Export the information as a CSV.

Set a Dummy Employer via Import.

It is not possible to set the Employer field to a blank value via Import or Bulk Action so, the Employer field will need to be set to a new value. To do this, create a new Column in the CSV called “New Employer Name” - we will set this as a fixed value. So that all of the blank Person Records will now be assigned to this Dummy Organisation.

As such as at the Field Mapping Stage (Stage 3) of the Import should look similar to:

We will then use the Person Reference in Stage 4 as the unique identifier to match for duplicate records.

Once the Import is completed, we need to accept the Import so that all of the Employers are updated on these People Records.

Setting the correct Employer by Import - Extending to Employer

Now we need to import the information again, this time setting the correct Employer, however this is not done by mapping to Employer^ instead you will need to use the Extend functionality to set the correct Employer as well as the Organisation Reference that we exported. Full information on this can be found on our Extending your Import page in the Knowledge Base.

Now the Field Mapping Stage (Stage 3) of the Import should look like the following:

Now that we have extended to the correct Employer this will not only map the Employer field on the Person Record, but also fully create the relationship between the Employer and Employee.

Once you have completed the above, you can then accept the Import. You should then refer back to the original Report to ensure that all of the Records have been updated and no longer appear within the Report.