Creating Accounts For Individuals in Bulk

BACKGROUND:

When a student, or other individual, becomes an adult (often when they become an alumnus), schools/organizations often like to create a new account for them personally, as opposed to having them remain solely on their parents’ account(s). This can be accomplished via creating a new account through the old account’s screen. We have now released (for AU clients) a feature to streamline the process – you simply pull a relevant list of individuals and create new accounts for them in bulk.

The general benefit of creating accounts via these bulk processes instead of just creating a manual, standard new account from scratch, is that these processes:

1. Ensure the accounts are properly linked as parents/child 
2. Offer the option to copy telephone/address info from the parents' accounts to the new accounts.
   

To use this new release, go to the General Updates screen (Tools → Data Maintenance → General Updates), and on the top, select the update “Create Accounts for Individuals.”

Then, if you click search, the screen will pull up a list of individuals.

Of course, you’d usually filter first for a precisely relevant list. For example, you would filter first for alumni who don’t yet have their own accounts, as shown in the screenshot on the bottom of this post.

Click search.

Then, check off the individuals for whom you wish to create accounts.

You will notice that one of the columns is labeled “ExistingAccountsWithThisName.” This column lists all accounts to which the respective individual is linked – other than the individual’s default account. You can review this column to help prevent duplicate accounts from getting created. (You wouldn’t want to select an individual who already has its own account… and this listing will help you figure out who does and who does not have their own account).

There is an “Open Account” button on the bottom right corner of the page. You can use this button to open selected accounts to review the information there.

There is also a greyed out “Process Option” box; just ignore it.

When you have finished selecting the correct individuals, click “Process.”

You will then get prompted for the following:

First, the system will ask if you are “sure”; you’ll click “Yes.”

Then, the system will prompt you for five things –

1. “Copy Tel from Parent” – Do you want to copy telephone numbers from the original parent accounts onto each respective new student account? If you leave this unchecked, no telephone numbers will be copied.

1. “Tel Type to Copy From” – Which telephone type from the parent accounts do you want to copy to the respective alumnus accounts? For instance, you can select “HOME.” (You’ll choose the type from the dropdown.)
   
   
2. “Tel Type for New Account” – With which available telephone type should the system label the copied telephone numbers on their new accounts? This means: What should the copied telephone numbers be labeled as (what type should they be labeled as) on their new accounts?
   
   To explain: If you selected to copy over “Home” numbers – numbers that were labeled “Home” on the original parent accounts, you may want those numbers to be labeled differently on the new alumnus accounts they are being copied to. So, you can choose from the dropdown, or, if you want a more customized label – for instance, if you wish them to be labeled “Parents’ Home,” or the like, you would edit the dropdown. To edit the dropdown and add more options, use Tools → List Editor → Editable Lists → TelType. Your consultant can help you get familiar with Editable Lists if you aren’t comfortable with them yet.
   
   
3. “Adr Type for New Address” – If you select any answer to this prompt, Admire will copy all the addresses from each selected parent account to the respective new accounts. (This is as opposed to what was stated above regarding copying telephone numbers; there, only one is copied per account.) If you don’t answer this prompt, Admire will not copy any addresses over. What this prompt is asking is: With which available address type should the system label the copied addresses on their new accounts? This means: What should the copied addresses be labeled as (what type should they be labeled as) on their new account? (All the addresses copied over for each account will be labeled with the same identical “type” based on what you choose here. The system will disregard the “type” they are labeled with on the parent accounts.)
   
   As we said above regarding telephone numbers, you can choose from the dropdown, or, if you want a more customized label – for instance, if you wish the addresses to be labeled “Parents’ Home,” or the like, you would edit the dropdown. To edit the dropdown and add more options, use Tools → List Editor → Editable Lists → AddressTypes. Your consultant can help you get familiar with Editable Lists if you aren’t comfortable with them yet.
   
   
4. “Proceed?” This must be selected, even if no telephone numbers or addresses are being copied. If this is not selected, the system will not create the new account.

Then click “OK.”

All done! Enjoy!

And here’s the filter you can use to pull alumni who don’t yet have their own accounts:

Notice the two fields indicated below:

Those are not typed in manually by you. Instead, right click on the first box, select “Build,” and then – in the “Fields” option in the “Build” menu – select “Parents Account Id.” Then, in the next box, right click again, select “Build,” and then, likewise – in the Fields" option in the “Build” menu – select “Mother Account Id.”

That portion of the filter is checking if the default account ID matches the account ID(s) of the parent(s).