Importing Additional Ship-To Addresses

Handshake's customer importer allows you to optionally specify a single additional ship-to address for each customer. If some or all of your customers have more ship-to addresses than just one, you'll need to import them separately in a spreadsheet as described below.

Creating new addresses vs. updating existing addresses

If you are using an accounting system or other 3rd party system that supports having IDs for addresses, you should import them into Handshake in the ship_id column. This will allow Handshake to correctly identify whether or not the address already exists and therefore whether to create a new address or update an existing one.

If you do not have an accounting system with IDs (and leave the ship_id column blank) then Handshake attempts to identify existing addresses based on total equality of all fields (e.g. ship_street, ship_street2 etc). This means if even one part of a ship-to address changes in your accounting system and you re-upload the spreadsheet, it will be considered to be a new address by Handshake.

Spreadsheet format

• cust_id is the customer ID, and tells Handshake which customer this address should be attached to. This is the most reliable method of linking an address to a customer.
• cust_name can be used instead of the ID to link an address to a customer. Since it's possible to have two customers with the same name, this is less reliable and Handshake will bail out with an error if it can't figure out which customer a particular name refers to.
• ship_id is a unique ID for this address, used for identifying it across multiple uploads as described above. You can repeat an ID for a different customer, but two addresses belonging to the same customer cannot have the same ID.
• ship_street, ship_city, ship_state and so on are exactly the same as in the customer importer.