We have good news for all companies who want to transfer appointments from another system into portatour® Anywhere: Starting from today, this will be enabled by the new Appointment Import Assistant. Click “Appointments” in the main menu, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Import”.

If you have imported customers into portatour® before, you will quickly find your way around the new Appointment Import Assistant, as the handling is the same: You select the desired import mode, upload the file with your appointments (supported formats: Excel, CSV, ODS), carry out the field assignments, check the import preview and then start the import process.

What you should consider in any case when importing appointments:

• Customer reference: Appointments that represent calls at existing customers must be assigned to the respective customers during the import. Only this assignment ensures that the automatic scheduling will work correctly and subsequently call reports will be attached to the correct customers. The assignment of an appointment to a customer works either via the customer’s “Portatour ID” or the “External ID”, the latter of which you can choose during the customer import (see also New key field: “External ID”).
• Time of the appointment: The time of an appointment is defined by the three fields “earliest begin”, “latest end” and “duration” (in minutes); you have the choice to omit “latest end” or “duration”. If you fill in all three fields and the duration is shorter than the period between “earliest begin” and “latest end”, then portatour® has a scope for optimization during scheduling. If you want to define an appointment as “flexible on the day”, set the “earliest begin” to 12:00 a.m., the “latest end” to 11:59 p.m. and the “duration” to the desired duration of the appointment, e.g. 30 minutes. Your working hours and your customers’ business hours will be automatically taken into account by portatour®.
• Address: If an appointment has a customer reference, the customer’s address will be automatically used as the address of the appointment during the import. This means you only need to import addresses for appointments if the appointment does not have a customer reference (e.g. internal training) or if the appointment shall take place at an address different to the customer’s address. Addresses will be automatically geo-coded during the import process.
• External ID: If you do not only want to import appointments once but also intend to update them lateron in this way, then import “External IDs” for your appointments, e.g. a unique and stable data record number from your host system. This “External ID” will serve as a key field during future import processes.

And a few more hints for the import of appointments:

• Use the export of appointments to obtain a file template for the import. If you export your appointments as an Excel file, you can edit that Excel file and re-import it. This allows you to mass edit appointments.
• Click the blue (i) symbol next to the individual field names in the import assistant to obtain explanations and hints on importing for the individual fields.
• You can also work with appointments that last several days – e.g. for trade shows or holidays. However, this case does not allow any leeway. To simplify matters, omit the duration in minutes in such cases.
• A restore point will be automatically created before each import process with the import assistant. In case an import has not provided the result you expected, you can go to options and reset to the data that was saved before the import by clicking “Restore”. Please note that all data input since the creation of the restore point will be discarded.
• If you have an enterprise account (2 users or more) you can – analogous to the customer import – also use the API interface for the import of appointments. This allows you to automate the process. The technical documentation is provided for your administrator in the options under “API”. In case you need support when using the API, please book our API workshop.
• Please consider: The more you import fixed appointments, the less room for optimization portatour® will have for automatic scheduling based on call intervals, i.e. for maximizing the number of customer visits and minimizing your travel time!

We wish you a lot of success using the new import possibility and look forward to receiving your feedback on feedback@portatour.com .

Hints:

• The import feature is not available for users who use portatour® in combination with Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector. In those cases appointments are automatically synchronized anyway.
• In addition, the import feature via the assistant is not available for an enterprise account if the import permission has been deactivated in the options by the administrator.

The following update is interesting for the IT administrators of all those companies who synchronize portatour® Anywhere with their existing ERP/CRM system via the API.

In addition to the “Portatour ID”, which is assigned automatically to each customer record by portatour®, you can now add an “External ID” to each customer. Typically, you will use the customer record ID from you existing ERP/CRM system.

The ID fields (Portatour ID, External ID) can be used together or individually in order to enable a clear assignment of imported data records to existing customers during subsequent data update imports. Of course you can still use custom fields as keys for data update imports. However, using the new field “External ID” offers the following differences:

• Just like for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also guarantees for the “External ID” that no duplicate IDs do exist in a user’s database. Custom fields do not offer this validation.
• As for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also prohibits the subsequent modification of the “External ID”. Thus, once the “External ID” has been set for a customer, it remains stable and can neither be changed via the user interface nor via an import or the API.
• The “External ID” is displayed in gray on the bottom right of the customer detail page. This enables a better identification of customers, especially for support cases within your company.
• The “External ID” must not be longer than 40 characters and only allows letters, numbers, and the following special symbols: ‘-‘, ‘_’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘.’
• The “External ID” is case sensitive, i.e. the ID “ABC123” does not equal “abc123”.
• By knowing a customer’s “External ID” you also know the URL of the customer’s detail page in portatour®. It is https://my.portatour.net/a/Customers/Details/H<ExternalID>. You replace <ExternalID> with the data record’s “External ID”, e.g.  https://my.portatour.net/ a/Customers/Details/Habc123 in the case of “abc123”. This allows directly linking to customers in portatour® from you existing system.

We recommend to import a customer’s “External ID” immediately during the first import. To do so, simply assign the respective field in the import assistant.

In case you already have customers in portatour® and want to add an “External ID”, then carry out an “update import” during which you use an existing field (e.g. customer number or Portatour ID) as a key field and at the same time allocate the field “External ID”.

Be careful when allocating “External IDs” as they cannot be changed retrospectively. In case you make a mistake, you can only go to “Options” and select “Delete data > External ID” and thus remove the “External IDs” from all the data records of the user.

Conclusion

You decide whether you want to use the “External ID” or not. The “External ID” offers a stricter handling of keys. A preview of the coming portatour® updates makes the use of the “External ID” highly attractive though: We are currently working on the possibility to import appointments. The “External ID” will make it easy to implement the relation between appointments and customers.

With today’s update of portatour®, it is now possible to export the current schedule as Excel or CSV file.

Go to Schedule and scroll to the bottom. Click the new button Export > As File. Select the desired format and click on Download.

The downloaded file contains all lines shown in the current schedule: suggested visits at customers, fixed appointments, drives, breaks and waiting times, departure and arrival for each day. Also, a summary for each day and for the whole plan is included.

By choosing the option “include customer data” or “include appointment data”, the exported lines for appointments and customer visits will include all data fields of the related customers or appointments respectively.

Exporting the schedule is a useful feature for everyone who wants to archive the schedule, forward it to third parties or process it electronically.

Hints:

• For the automated processing of schedules in enterprises with 2 or more field reps, exporting the schedule is now available as part of the API. Read the API documentation to find all details on the new “ExportSchedule” function.
• The options “include customer data” and “include appointment data” are not available for users who lack the permission for data export or who are using portatour® Anywhere in combination with a host system (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Connector).