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How does the Web to Lead form handle existing Leads?
How does the Web to Lead form handle existing Leads?

What happens if a lead is entered in a form and they already exist.

Updated over a week ago

The Web to Lead app gives you a web form to collect information from or leads.

Lead: A lead is a potential customer and they are not synced to QuickBooks. When a lead converts to a real customer (either manually or via a transaction), then they will sync to QuickBooks and are no longer a lead.

With each lead that comes in, Method will need to decide on a Customer display name, because eventually, QuickBooks will require this. Normally a user can choose what this will be as shown below in the QuickBooks Online image:

When the Web to Lead form is filled in, it does a few checks:

  • Assigning the Name as it will be Displayed in QuickBooks:

    • The Name given to lead will be the submitted Company Name.

    • If the Company Name field is left blank, then the Name used will be the first and last name.

  • Method searches to see if this Name matches other names in your customer list. A match is found if a record starts with the entirety of the name.

    • e.g. "Pop and Skate" matches "Pop and Skate Inc"

  • Method searches to see if the entered Email exists in Method

Based on what it finds, the Web to Lead form continues as follows:

  • If a Name match is not found, a new lead is created.

  • If a Name match is found and the email also exists, then no new lead is created and matched name is used.

  • If a Name match is found but the email doesn't exist, then a new lead is created with the Name followed by a number indicating the number of existing matches. If that new name also exists, then a Name is created appended with the current date.

In all cases, a new activity and opportunity will be created.

The above three cases cannot account for every situation where a customer already exists in Method. If you find a duplicate has been entered and they have converted to a customer and thus synced to QuickBooks, you can manually merge those two records in Quickbooks or Method.

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