I am going to have to set up a project. which involves transfering data from an alms system onto our current raiser edge system. There will be approx 10,000 records which will need to be transfered. My concerns are: 1) its like that some of the constituents will already be on raisers edge, so how can i avoid duplication. Is the only way just to run the duplicate report once i have imported all the data! 2) how would i import data and make raisers edge create a constituent id for me whilst importing. As the Alms urn will be put in as an attribute so that the constituent id on raisers is consitent. Is this the best way to do it? How would i import this data without creating a constituent id first? other than that, any tips or ideas would be much appericated. Thank you for your time. Ayse. Contactable by email: [Email Removed] Please visit www.sja.org.uk for more information about St John Ambulance. Also if you have any spare time check out. www.officialfoundonvincentward.com

For major import like this, I use Access to massage/clean-up the data as much as reasonable before importing. I export basic constituent and if necessary contacts/relationships from RE and import it and new data into seperate tables in Access. I use Access queries to match exact dups on a variety of fields (last name, first, address, city, state) and where possible use update queries to flag the dups/possible dups; then sort in a variety of ways looking for dups and things that need to be cleaned up. After importing, I continue to look in RE for dups that might have been missed. I typically generate my own ConsID using something like "ALMS" followed by the id that came from ALMS; that way at a glance, I would know where this record came from. Or I look at what the next system generated ID would be then bump it up by whatever number of rcds I'm importing; then I populate my import data to use that intervening range of IDs. If you don't want to generate the ConID, then instead populate Import ID to whatever you want and let system generate ConsID. Hope ths helps. Best. bb

hello Ayse and Beverly, We are also facing a similar problem, importing data from an online donation system, and facing the issue of not having a unique identifier. Have you done your import yet Ayse? Would love to hear how it goes...and we'll at trying your solution Beverly. Thanks marie [Email Removed]