QuickBooks Customer vs Novi AMS Member Record

Learn how QuickBooks customers can have company and person information while Novi AMS divides records into people & companies.

Pete Zimek, CAE avatar
Written by Pete Zimek, CAE
Updated over a week ago

A QuickBooks customer can be a company, a person, or a person who works for a company. A member record in Novi AMS can be a company OR a person. 

Novi AMS Member Record

In the association space, it's often imperative for organizations to distinguish between companies and people. A Novi record is either a company or a person. Our users must make a choice at the very beginning.

Company

You'll notice the same "Display Name" carried over from QuickBooks. This will also map to the Company Name field inside of QuickBooks.

Person

The person record in Novi will have Prefix, First, Middle, Last, and Suffix. Those will be mapped over to those same fields in QuickBooks. They will also be combined to create the Display Name.

If you want to show that the person works for a company, then you'll need to use the Parent Member field in Novi. A person working for a company would require two separate records - a person and a company - linked together.

Note: The Parent Member field can have a custom name based on your association settings, but it will always be displayed in the same location.


QuickBooks Customer Record

The QuickBooks customer record will track a person's name (first, last, etc) as well as a company's name. Users can create a record with the name "Amy Lauterbach" and the company name of "Amy's Bird Sanctuary."  To QuickBooks, it doesn't matter if the underlying represents a company or a person - every record is simply a customer.

Display Name

In all cases, QuickBooks will force the user to choose a display name. This is the name that QuickBooks uses elsewhere. It's also the primary piece of data that is synced over to other platforms like Novi AMS.

The way you interact with the Display Name field can say a lot about your organization and your customer records. If an organization sets the display name to "Amy's Bird Sanctuary," then you most likely consider your organization as one that does business with companies. Setting the Display Name to "Amy Lauterbach" most likely implies that your core members are people.

Display Name Determines the Novi AMS Record

To automate our connection with QuickBooks, Novi AMS uses the Display Name to determine whether a QuickBooks customer should be brought into Novi as a company or a person. If the Display Name is the same as the Company Name, then we'll import the record as a company record into Novi. If the Display Name uses the First and Last, then we'll import the record as a person.

Note: If a record only has a Display Name, and the other name fields are blank, Novi will consider this to be a company record.


Character Limits for Name Fields

  • Prefix: 16

  • First: 100

  • Middle: 100

  • Last: 100

  • Suffix: 16

  • Display Name: 100


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