Any one have tips on they handle Customer IDs. We currently have ours mapped to be the same as the company name, but we have a data migration project that is coming out of the Salesforce and that Company Name can be duplicated. We can just appended a unique ID at the end of the customer ID, but wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions. I know that the company ID is what shows up in the global search within NetSuite, but wondering if there are other caveats.

why not just use external id to differentiate and prevent dupes

How does external ID and Customer ID interact with each other? I understand external IDs can be unique, but if customer IDs and company names are the same I have the same issue, right?

For our Salesforce<>NS integration, we have the Salesforce Account/Opp ID mapped to External ID in NS so if the integration tries to create a duplicated customer record in NS by accident, creation will fail. Similarly, we write back the internal ID of the customer record to the Salesforce Account/Opp. If you do it this way, you can have all the duplicate Customer IDs and Company Names that you want (assuming they represent different records), though I wouldn't recommend it.

So we have the NS ID being written back to Salesforce, and then the SF ID being written to a Custom field (celigo) in Salesforce. We have the the customer ID and customer name being sourced from the same field in Salesforce. But if NetSuite has the same customer IDs a customer can't be created. So are you and Sam saying the same thing, and if we used an external ID than NetSuite doesn't care about the Customer ID being duplicated?

Both SF and NS have external key (external ID), SF Record ID =>NS External ID and NS Internal id =>SF external key

Yep I understand that. But our Customer IDs (entityid) in NetSuite can not have duplicates. We currently just use Customer Name as our Customer ID and the Company name is the same. If I update the company name the Customer ID also changes to that Auto is deselected and then selected again.

Note external ID is never exposed to UI you need set it via CSV or integration. Every single record in NS have external ID field but not exposed.

I also understand that.

Is there a reason you're not using the Customer auto-numbering? The value is completely arbitrary unless you build logic into it, so I'm generally not in favor of using it. And IIRC on certain reporting, it annoyingly used to only show customer numbers. But that would get around your duplication issue, though it would be confusing. I'd definitely play with that in Sandbox first though. I have a vague recollection of that causing some issues on occasion.

Just what was happening before I started working here and hadn't caused any issues up until this data migration project (data has multiple customers with the same name, but still are needed because of other aspects on the accounts). When I quickly tested it seemed like the Customer ID is what populated in the global search, pick list, and reporting. So if we were to change it would have to be Name + some identifier. I figured if we only put a auto generated number search and pick list would be terrible experience.

Auto Generated Numbers is the way to go here. My first netsuite experience was as a customer where we had 100's of customers and prospects named ABC Construction.

@C_Billings So with auto generated numbers, global search/pick list are just a string of numbers? In my testing the global search was just the customer ID (which would be the auto generated numbers in this case).

so with auto generated numbers i would type in ABC Construction and multiple records would show listed as 124 ABC Construction, 555 ABC Construction etc