Linking Rules Concepts

You can link customers, vendors, or contacts to parent tables, ensuring that any changes made to the parent is automatically copied to the children. The rules you configure in this workspace dictate which data is copied from the parent to the child.

The general functionality of linking rules is identical for customers, vendors, and contact companies.

Using linking rules, you can copy the information you entered on a certain customer's information card to one or more customers' or company-specific customers' information cards. You can also set up hierarchies between customers, where one customer is placed as parent customer and one or more customers are placed as subordinate customers. You assign a subordinate customer to a parent customer on the subordinate customer's information card in the Parent Customer card, where you specify the parent customer and the linking rule.

If you defined a template customer in the System Information or Company Information workspace, Maconomy uses this template when you create new customers. However, to enable Maconomy to automatically copy information from the template customer, you must set up at least one linking rule for the relevant database tables (Customer and Company Customer).

Using linking rules allows you to populate standard or company-specific customers' information. Information entered on a parent customer's information card can be automatically copied to subordinate customers' information cards. The extent of information copied from a parent customer to subordinate customers depends on the specific linking rule applied in each case.

In a linking rule, you define the standard linking method to use, along with any exceptions to apply. For example, you can create a rule using the "Full" linking method, which means all information from a parent customer's information card is always copied to subordinate customers' information cards. In the table of this workspace, you can add exceptions to this linking method. For example, you might set the linking method to None for the Name1, Name2, Attn., Phone, and E-mail fields. This ensures that Maconomy does not copy information from these fields from the parent customer, as their content is intended to be unique for each customer.

In the Linking Rules card, you can enter the name of the of the current linking rule and identify the database fields to be linked, as specified in the Parent Table, Default and Subordinate Table fields. You can also modify the standard linking method, as specified in Linking Method field. In addition, you can also indicate whether the linking rule should be used as the standard linking rule for the selected database tables by selecting the Standard Linking Rule checkbox. You use a standard linking rule in cases where a company-specific customer is created without a specified linking rule on the information card.

In the table, you can create specific field rules with assigned linking methods, allowing you to specify exceptions to the standard linking method specified in the Linking Rules card.