User Support Forum

We are getting a new area code overlay in August. A lot of our members phone numbers have been entered without an area code.

Is there a quick and easy way to update all area codes for existing members or do we need to go through and update each individual record? Thanks for your help.

donebb wrote:We are getting a new area code overlay in August. A lot of our members phone numbers have been entered without an area code.

Is there a quick and easy way to update all area codes for existing members or do we need to go through and update each individual record? Thanks for your help.

There is no easy way to do this. You may want to contact Powerchurch directly as they can probably walk you through doing something using the database manager utility.

It can be somewhat complicated for non-techie users.

The other alternative is to just include the area code on new entries, and assume that all previous entries are under the old code. I'm assuming that the overlay will only take effect for any new phones in the area. In that case this will work, and all you'll need to do is update the old entries whenever they are changed for any other reason.

Unfortunately, this is not something that can be done in the database manager, either. There are phone numbers stored in 5 different tables in the database (that I can think of right off hand) and in those 5 tables, there are at least 10 different phone number fields.

To be able to do this in code, rather than fixing them manually in the program interface, we would have to account for every possible combination of how you may have entered a phone number, such as 555-1234, 5551234, 8885551234, (888) 555-1234, 888-555-1234, and consider additions of extensions and other non-phone number related information in the phone number fields.

In talking about it around the office, we estimate this would be approximately a 3 to 4 hour job of writing a program to fix this for you, which is right along the same time frame of the Membership Data Conversion service, which runs $200.

If you have thousands of family, profile, vendors, and customer phones, this may be worth it to you. If so, give us a call at (800) 486-1800, otherwise, it will have to be a manual process of fixing them one at a time.

Whew ... my off the cuff answer didn't account for the three numbers on the mailing list, then the ones on the personal profiles, etc.

You're right, it would take a bit of work.