If you’ve ever tried to migrate third-party billing systems into ModernBill, I sympathize. I’ve been tasked with migrating some 1600+ customers and 2900+ service plans from an unnamed SQL-based third party billing system into ModernBill, and boy, what a task.
First of all, the API documentation is scant. Ben at ModernGigabyte has ben extraordianrily helpful with trial and error documentation.
Here are a couple of important caveats: f
1) When importing customers, make sure you have filled out the “countries” and “languages” fields. Without these, you will get successful imports, but you won’t be able to find them in the ModernBill interface, because the queries that generate the views for the interface require these fields for successful joins.
2) Debug is your friend. Enable debug under events, do a sample creation of a customer or package (especially try “import historical package”) then look at the debug log, under the entry with the word “Response” in the name. Cut and paste the entire entry, yes, I know it’s big. Narrow it down to just the XML, beginning and ending with the mbapi tags, and you’ll see exactly what the system generated to create what you created. Now you can apply this to your existing data, creating a large import file.
3) USE NOTES. When importing a package, you’ll need the new customer ID. In my case, I obtained this by populating the client_note_text field at customer import time with the original customer ID, then querying the modernbill client_notes table for the client ID of the record containing that customer ID. It will also be helpful when importing packages to populate the package notes field in case you need to refer back to it later.
And yes, I am available for consulting for ModernBill imports and migrations.
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