Importing
=========

The most common scenario involves Rattail importing most
Person-related data from other (e.g. POS or CRM) systems.

However it should be noted that Rattail is meant to live "alongside"
the other systems, it is not normally going to "replace" them - and
this means Rattail must *continually* import data from the other
systems, to remain accurate.  This may be done nightly, or hourly, or
even in "real-time" (e.g. once every few seconds, or 5 minutes) -
whatever is needed and/or is possible given the system constraints.

One immediate feature that comes "for free" when importing data into
Rattail, is its versioning history, aka. audit trail.  Each time an
import actually *changes* a record in Rattail, the new data is
separately stored as a "version" record along with the timestamp and
the "user" who made the change.  In the case of import, the "user" is
the system from which data is being imported; a dedicated User account
is created for this purpose (which does not tie back to any Person).

We're talking here of importing data from e.g. POS into Rattail.  But
if it's also possible to "import" e.g. new Customer records into your
POS or other system, then Rattail can also be used as a workflow tool
to assist with organizing new records for import to your other system.
See :doc:`batches` for more about that.