When I started using Solar Accounts - I asked about entering names Surname; Firstname and was told that this would be a problem with printing out invoices. So (somewhat reluctantly) entered names as Firstname Surname.

I notice that SA now supports the Surname; Firstname convention. However I have 580+ customers in my database now. Is there an easy way to mass edit these names to Surname; Firstname?

Also on the customer screen can we have a 'quick filter' search box, please so that we can quickly view say just the customers called "smith" or quickly see all the "john" entries? With a large customer base as I have it takes a long while to scroll though to find out if a person has been entered already especially when they are all organised by first name as they are at the moment.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your feedback - I'll note your suggestion about having a way to filter the customers list. Note that at the moment you can search for the first letters in of the name by typing those letters. So typing 'john' will get you to the johns.

Solar Accounts doesn't have a way to automatically change 'John Smith' to 'Smith; John'. However, you could do this by exporting the customer list to a CSV file, edit the file in excel to change the name column, then import back into Solar Accounts.

By the way, I think this Excel function will produce 'Smith; John' if cell A1 contains 'John Smith':
=CONCATENATE(RIGHT(A1,SEARCH(" ",A1)),", ",LEFT(A1,SEARCH(" ",A1)-1))

Regards,

Hi Mark,
Thanks for the reply. I am aware of the 'jump to' facility which works well, but doesn't help if the bit of the name you can remember is not the first part of the entry.

I will try the export method you describe - but what I'm not sure about is how to 'relink' the imported customers with their existing transactions.

Thanks
Ian.

Hi Ian,

Whoops I made a mistake - I thought that the CSV export-import process could simply update the existing customer name, but it looks like it would create an entirely new customer. For this reason I don't think the CSV procedure would be useful - you would need to manually change the name of each customer. Sorry.

Regards,