Figure 3.1 — The Customer record (360° view). Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: annotated capture of a customer record naming the five KPI cards, the tab strip, and the Details cards.
Open a customer and you get the 360° pattern of 1.4: five KPI cards — Lifetime Value (everything this customer has ever been invoiced), Orders, Outstanding AR (what they owe now), Overdue and Deposits Held (down payments banked but not yet applied to any invoice — the customer's money in your hands) — the money cards in your company's currency, foreign invoices converted at their frozen rates (1.4) — then tabs: Details first, Contacts, Sales Orders, Sales Invoices, Receipts, Statement, Dunning History, Attachments, Activity. The Details tab is the record itself, arranged in cards — General, Contact, Ship-to Address, Bill-to Address, Financial, Tax & Other — and its fields are the form you fill when creating or editing the customer:
- Code — the customer's short identity (CUS-…), suggested from your numbering sequence and unique within your company. It prefixes the customer everywhere they are picked from a list.
- Short name — the name everyone uses, required; Long name is the full legal name that prints where formality matters.
- Category — groups the customer for reporting, and carries defaults: picking a category can set the AR control account, the vatable flag and the sales tax code below in one motion.
- Sales territory — shown when your company tracks sales reps. The customer is allocated to a territory, and sales documents for this customer inherit the territory and its rep automatically.
- Telephone, Email, Website — the contact basics; email is where statements and prints are addressed.
- Ship-to Address and Bill-to Address — where goods go, and where invoices go; they differ often enough to deserve separate homes. Choosing the bill-to country proposes the customer's currency at setup, because the country a customer is billed in usually names the currency they transact in.
- Currency — the customer's transaction currency: the currency their documents are raised in by default. It sits immediately before the credit limit on purpose — the limit is denominated in this currency, and the two must be read together.
- Credit Limit — present when credit management is on. Its meaning is exact: blank means no credit check (a trusted customer); 0 means no credit at all — orders must be prepaid in full before delivery; a figure is the ceiling on their exposure, in their currency, converted to your books' currency at the stored rate whenever exposure is checked.
- Manual credit hold — a stop-all switch on the customer: while it is on, their orders are held for credit regardless of figures. It never releases automatically (§3.5).
- Credit Terms (days) — how many days after an invoice date payment falls due, by default, for this customer.
- Payment Terms — a named terms set from your catalogue; when chosen, it overrides the plain days above for due dates and any early-payment discount.
- AR Control Account — the ledger account this customer's invoices post into (Accounts, Chapter 7); most companies keep one trade-debtors account and let the category set it. If you leave it blank, the company fills it with its trade-debtors control account when the customer is created, so the customer can be invoiced and receipted from the start.
- Vatable and Sales Tax Code — the customer's tax position, fed into every line's tax calculation on their documents.
- Active — inactive customers disappear from pickers; their history does not disappear from anywhere.
- Block dunning — excludes this customer from reminder runs (§3.5).
- Contacts — the people at the customer, added here at creation and maintained afterwards on the Contacts tab.