Customers

A customer is an individual or a business who purchases the products you sell or the services your company provides. For example, a customer could be an individual who buys your retail sports equipment, a homeowner who wants to hire your staff to build a fence, a corporation which subcontracts your staff for security services, a client who regularly orders wholesale items for their hardware store, a theatrical troupe paying their monthly rent for a facility rental.

Why do I need to track customers?

If you ever need to invoice a customer for a sale, or want to track customer details for future business activities,we highly recommend that you add a customer record to Sage Simply Accounting. Customer records allow you to:

• Save time because you don't have to enter contact information every time you invoice the same customer.
• Easily track overdue invoices.
• Set up preferred pricing for valued customers. (Premium)
• Monitor customer sales revenues compared to your business expenses.
• Identify internal customers to keep track of employee activities that are not directly related to an external customer. (Premium)

One-time customers

If you are a retail operation that always receives payment at the time of sale, it may not be necessary to set up a customer record. However,if you want to track all sales from single-sale customers or customers with whom you rarely do business, create a record called One-time Customer. Entering a sale using this customer record tracks these sales without recording a customer name or other details, and stores the transactions as a lump sum for reporting purposes.

My customers are called members/patients/clients (Premium)

Not all companies refer to their customers with the term, customers.Sage Simply Accounting allows you to create a custom name for the people or organizations with whom you do business: buyers, clients, donors, guests, members, patients, patrons, residents, supporters, tenants.

Quickly add a new customer during a sale

Sage Simply Accounting allows you to add a new customer quickly to the program without going through the formal process of creating a new customer record. Add a customer "on the fly" when you create a sales invoice or accept a customer deposit. You can always go back later into the customer record to enter more information.

Finished doing business with a customer

If you no longer do business with a specific customer, and still want to keep their transaction information for reporting purposes, set the customer record to inactive.

If you no longer do business with a specific customer, and do not want to store reporting information on a customer, a customer's record can be removed when:

• There is a zero balance on the customer's account.
• The customer's transactions in Sage Simply Accounting have been cleared.
• There are no outstanding sales orders or quotes for this customer.

What do you want to do?

Create a customer record

Modify a customer record

Display a list of customers

Change the terminology Sage Simply Accounting uses for customers (Premium)

Record a fixed discount for a customer

Set up preferred customer pricing (Premium)

Add or change early-payment terms for a customer

Merge customer records

Make a customer record inactive

Remove a customer record

Enter a sales invoice

Show outstanding invoices

Find out about customer analysis reports