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| A Yahoo Pipes Mashup Product for Use in Customer Servicing by Richard Torian November 19, 2009 A Yahoo Pipes mashup product has been created that shows the following customer information: 1. The customer’s category (customer type in QuickBooks terminology); 2. The sales representative servicing the costumer; 3. The customer's street, city, and state address; 4. Contact information for the customer; 5. The amount owed by the customer as of a recent date; 6. The customer’s credit limit; 7. Amounts of recent sales and the sales dates; 8. Amounts of recent sales orders, the sales order date, and the sales order numbers (numbers assigned by QuickBooks); 9. Recent purchase orders issued in response to sales orders, with the purchase order numbers that correspond to the sales orders numbers provided (QuickBooks assigned numbers). Also provided is the vendor’s name issued the purchase order. 10. The mashup also shows the location of the customer on a Yahoo Map which can be drilled down or up, depending on the geographical information needed. All data used in generating this Yahoo Pipes mashup product comes from spreadsheets that are generated from a QuickBooks company file (data is fictitious). Click here to see the results of the Yahoo Pipes mashup product. Enter a customer name (Hamby; Weeks; Freeman; Bowden; Peacock; National Burger; Tingey; or Yoga Central) to see the results for that customer. QuickBooks reports are exported to Excel spreadsheets and then transferred to Google spreadsheets, for publishing on the Internet and for use by Yahoo Pipes. Therefore, the date of the data in the Yahoo Pipes mashup product is the date range use in generating the QuickBooks reports. To update the Yahoo Pipes customer information, new reports with current dates are needed. Then, data on these reports have to be transferred to spreadsheets on Google documents. Once this is accomplished, the Yahoo Pipes product automatically updates. If memorized reports are used in QuickBooks, the updating process should not take more than a few minutes. The following are considered useful attributes of this Yahoo Pipes mashup product: 1. Much more customer information appears on the Yahoo Pipes product output than can be shown on any one QuickBooks report; 2. The information appears on a webpage, so that the information can be accessed very quickly from any computer that is connected to the Internet; 3. The information includes a map showing the customer location, handy when mapping information is needed; and 4. Any customer data included in QuickBooks generated reports, and programmed for by the mashup product, can quickly be brought up on the screen by entering the customer’s name. The following are considered drawbacks of this Yahoo Pipes mashup product: 1. The data needs to be updated with newly generated reports, if the most recent company data is needed, and a recent update has not been done; and 2. The data presented is “fixed”, meaning that the Yahoo Pipes product requires modification in order for any additional information appearing on the QuickBooks reports to show on the Yahoo Pipes output. |