What is the "Copy Data" Utility?
The copy data utility in Smart Service has a very specific purpose, saving you from doing double entry when updating customer information. If you make an update to the customer’s information, this tool will allow you to copy that information over to their existing records.
When introducing this feature, we often get the question of why such a utility is necessary. When you create a job record for a customer and change the address, contact information, or anything else, those changes were only made on that specific job. Those changes do not automatically update the customer record’s information in case only this one particular job needed the information you added.
The copy data utility was created for a different purpose from the reasoning for the “Lookup Tool“, please keep that in mind when reading this article. The lookup tool will copy information from any ONE record to another, whereas the copy data utility allows you to update customer information for that one customer and their jobs.
Since you may have only noticed the outdated information once the job record has been created, you can use the copy data tool to update the customer record, rather than opening the customer record and double-entering the new data.
The image to the left displays all of the fields that can be updated on the job record and copied over to the customer record, or any other records (including other jobs) for the customer in question. This tool cannot be used to copy data between different customers.
How to Use the "Copy Data" Utility
The first step is to make a change to the customer’s information. Whether you make a change on the job level that you want to copy to the customer level or a change on the customer/location level you’d like to transfer to job records will work.
Once the current record has the information you wanted to update on it, you can proceed with the copy data utility. Follow the steps below to copy the changes to other records within this customer.
As shown in the slides above, once you make changes to the record, the copy data tool will guide you through a short series of steps that allow you to choose what information will be copied and to what record it will be copied.
When selecting which record to copy the information to, the current record will be grayed out. On that same screen, there’s also a “select all” option at the top. No errors should occur in the copy data process, provided that the records you’re copying data to are currently closed. Data cannot be changed on records that are currently open for anyone using Smart Service.