The Vendor Combiner/Modifier and Customer Combiner/Modifier officially became an option in the Sales and Purchasing Utilities menus with the release of GP2015.  Previously, these tools were only available in PSTL.  However, it recently became clear to me that many users are still surprised to find these options.  Whether users have just avoided going into the Utilities menus or their security settings prevented them from seeing this “new” utility, once they discover it, they almost immediately can come up with a list of customers or vendors they have been wanting to fix “forever.” 

Do you have more than one Vendor IDs or Customer IDs for the same Vendor or Customer?  Have you had to remember which of the duplicates to use, inactivate one or mark one clearly as Do Not Use?  Now you can use the Combiner utility to merge a source (or the bad) Vendor/Customer into a destination Vendor/Customer (the one you want to keep).  All Work, Open and Historical transactions for the source Vendor/Customer get combined into the destination Vendor/Customer records and then the old or source Vendor/Customer gets removed.  Wonderful! 

Do you just not like the Vendor or Customer ID that was used?  Was there a name change and now the old ID no longer make sense with the new name?  Just use the Modifier utility to update an old ID to a new ID.  Like with the Combiner utility, all Work, Open, and Historical transactions are also updated with the new ID.   

If you want to make major changes to your ID structure, requiring modifications to a large set of data, an Excel file can be imported to update multiple ID’s.  Two columns listing Source ID’s and Destination ID’s (or Old and New) is all that is needed. 

Two things to be aware of:  1) Even though these tools were made available in the main GP menus, it still requires the user to be logged in as the ‘sa’ user.  So, if you still don’t see these utilities under your user login, you certainly will from the ‘sa’ user login.  Because the use of these tools means you are making major changes to your GP data, this requirement ensures that you have full authority and permission to make the modifications.  It should also be a good flag that 2) You should always backup your database prior to combining or modifying your data.  Whether you are making changes to one Vendor/Customer or your whole list, a backup should be considered a must. 

Find these options under Purchasing > Utilities > Vendor Combiner and Modifier or Sales > Utilities > Customer Combiner and Modifier.