This topic explains how to prepare and import account data from an external data source into Oracle Sales Cloud using the File-Based Data Import feature.
An account is an entity with whom you have a selling relationship. Oracle Sales Cloud refers to sales profile and sales prospects collectively as an Account. An account business object allows you to capture all information about an account, such as the account profile, account contact relationships information, and account contact points.
A sales profile is a specific sell-to entity within a given account. You can create leads and opportunities for sales profiles. An entity with a sales profile can be one of the following:
• Sales Prospect: A prospective entity or person who does not have a sell-to address. This entity is used to define
leads.
• Account: A sales profile or sales prospects.
• Legal Entity: A legal entity is a party that can enter into legal contracts or a business relationship. It can be sued if it
fails to meet contractual obligations.
You can use the Account import object to import sales profiles or sales prospects of the type organization. You can use the Household import object to import accounts of the type household, and the Contact import object to import accounts of the type person.
Consider the following questions when importing your data:
• Did you identify the records that should be imported as sales prospects, and the records that should be imported as
sales profiles?
• How does your legacy or source system represent the account information compared to how Oracle Sales Cloud
represents the same data?
• Do you have to configure values in Oracle Sales Cloud to map your existing data values to the Account import
object?
• What import features are available for importing your business object? • How do I verify my imported data?
Comparing Business Object Structures
You must understand how your account data corresponds with the data in Oracle Sales Cloud so that you can map your legacy data to the data that Oracle Sales Cloud requires. First, you must understand how Oracle Sales Cloud represents the structure of the data for an account.
The Account import object structure is hierarchical. The root of the hierarchy is the organization profile, which must exist before you can import lower-level components, such as classifications, contacts, and sales profiles. These child entities can have other entities as their child entities. This hierarchical structure supports one-to-many relationships between the components that make up the account.
The following figure shows the account object and its child entities.
The organization profile contains basic information about the account, such as the customer name and party usage. For each account, you can assign classifications, contacts, sell to addresses, phone details, and additional names. The contact of the account, in turn, includes other child entities that capture information about the contact, such as contact job, contact primary phone, contact primary address, and contact e-mail.
Note
All contact entities, such as primary phone or e-mail, include a child entity that captures the contact preference. For example, the Primary Phone Contact Preference entity captures the contact preference of the account for the contact method primary phone.
Comparing Business Object Data
Each import object is a collection of attributes that helps to map your data to the Oracle Sales Cloud data and to support one-to-many relationships between the structural components that make up the account.
You must understand the attribute details of the import objects so that you can prepare your import data. You can use reference guide files that contain attribute descriptions, values that populate attributes by default when you do not provide values, and validation information for each attribute. The validation information includes the navigation path to the task where you can define values in Oracle Sales Cloud. For example, if you have values in your data that correlate to a choice list in Oracle Sales Cloud, then the validation information for that attribute provides the task name in the Setup and Maintenance work area where you can define your values. For additional information, including a list of reference guide file names and locations that you need to complete this task, see the topic listed in the following table.
Import Object Related Import Object Topic
Account
Account Import Objects : How They Work Together Hint: You can use the keyword importing accounts to search for related topics in Oracle Sales Cloud Help.
Extensible Attributes
If you want to extend the Oracle Sales Cloud object to import your legacy or source data, then you must use Application Composer to design your object model extensions and to generate the required artifacts to register your extensions and make them available for importing. The corresponding import object is updated with the extensible attributes, which you can then map to your source file data. You can use the same source file to import both extensible custom attributes and the standard import object attributes