4.6.1. Creating Partners – Babelway

You can create your partners one at a time through the interface. Or you can import them from a CSV file.

Manually

To define your partners, the easiest way is to go to the Partners section. As for all sections, you will first come to a main screen with the list of all your partners.

Partners section

The action button Create Partner, at the bottom of the list allows you to define new partners. You just have to fill the different information. As for all other objectives, you can also use the Reuse and save time zone, at the right of the screen, to easily import partners already defined in the Babelway catalogue. See the section Reuse and save time section for more details.

Partner creation

The identifiers that you assign to this partner are quite important, as they will be used to identify the partners of your messages. For example, when an order will be processed, the system will see that the sender of the order is the company with TVA BE XXX. It will deduce your partner (and make the link) by finding which partner you have assigned this TVA number to. For this reason, you can not have two different partners with the same identifier. See the section Assigning partners to messages for more details.

It is up to you to organize your partners as you want. The best way is to make them really like you think, encoding how your relationship with your clients happens. Some people may for example want to have two different partners for "Carrefour Belgium" and for "Carrefour France", while others are not interested by the distinction and just want a single partner "Carrefour". And other ones would prefer different partners for every supermarket ("Carrefour Wavre", "Carrefour Bruxelles", ...). You can choose the solution that best fits your needs. To do so, you just have to list all the ids (TVA, GLN, ...) of all the companies that you want to group into this partner.

All the other fields are quite informative, and you can use them freely to store and retrieve your main information about the partner.

If you want to store other data for your partners, you can add your own fields in the Environment settings / Partners.

These custom fields will be available in the edition of the partners, or in the list, as is the case for the standard fields.

Editing of partners

Partner list

Through an Import

The import partners page allows you to import all your partners from a CSV file.

Importing Partners From CSV

CSV File	The CSV file contains the list of partners you wish to import. The first line must contain the column headers for the values you wish to import. The file must only contain existing columns and may not include system columns such as "Environment", "Creation date", "ID"... Below is a working CSV sample: "PartnerIdentifiers";"Name";"Description" "OTHER:123456";"Julien Inc.";"Supplies" "OTHER:654987";"Bertrand & Co";"Mergers and Acquisitions" "OTHER:123478";"Mathieu Square";"Music Duet" All the other lines in the file represent a partner. If the partner identifier is known, the identified partner will be updated upon import. Values for most columns can be written out in plain text. The following types require a specific format for babelway to interpret them properly: DateTime: Accepted formats are "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss" and "yyyyMMddHHmmss" or your preferred user format (see environment preferences). Date: Dates are expected in the following format: "DD/MM/YYYY" or "YYYY-MM-DD". Partner Identifiers: These should be presented as a comma separated list of identifiers ("CODE:Value"). For example: "VAT:BE1234567890" or "VAT:BE1234567890,GLN:1234567890123" are valid partner identifiers.
Delimiter Character	The delimiter character separates different values in a given line.
Quote Character	Text between your "Quote Character"s will be handled as a single value/entry.
File Encoding	Encoding of your csv file.