When importing records into the Contact Entity in Dynamics 365 Business Central, we can receive the error “Failed to create record. You must select an existing contact.“
Cause
When the Company Name being set on the Contact Card does not match any existing Customer or Vendor name, we will see this error.
NOTE: If you do not map the Company Name field on the Contact Card, then it will automatically set the Company Name to the same value you have mapped to the Contact Name, and we will not receive this error. The error above can only happen when you have Company Name mapped.
Resolution
Make sure the Customer or Vendor already exists in Business Central. This may require running another integration to create customers/vendors before the integration to import Contacts.
If the Customer or Vendor already exists, but you do not have the Customer or Vendor Name in your source data, then an OData Field Lookup can be used to retrieve the Customer/Vendor Name. The lookup can only be used if you have a value in the source data that matches to the Customer/Vendor.
Lastly, you could remove the mapping for the Company Name field. The Company Name field will automatically be filled in using the Contact Name value and the Contact Business Relation will be set to None instead of Customer/Vendor. You do not need to have an existing Customer or Vendor to use this option.
