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 Batches for more about that.