Manage customers
Companies sell to customers and customers are the source of your income. You need to register each customer by creating customer cards. Similar to accessing items, you can access customer cards from the customer list, which can also be displayed in three ways:
as a list
as tiles
as tall tiles
On the General FastTab of the customer card, you can enter information such as the name, the credit limit, and the salesperson. On this tab, you can access the balances and total sales, and by selecting Show more, you can also look up the profit that you made on a customer. Additional fields on the General FastTab are IC Partner Code for intercompany usage, Responsibility Center, and Document Sending Profile, which specifies the preferred method of sending documents to a customer. Specifying the preferred sending method means that you don't have to select a sending option every time that you post and send a document to the customer.
The Address & Contact FastTab displays information on the company's address and main contact, in addition to the language that is used for the company. On a customer card, you can use the Show on Map field to open the online map service that is configured on the Online Map Setup page and find the address or get route directions.
The Invoicing FastTab provides information that is related to the invoicing process such as posting groups, VAT, or tax. If you want to use a currency other than the local currency with a customer, you can enter the specific currency in the Currency Code field. Additionally, on customer cards, you can enter price and discount information and how many invoice copies should be printed for a customer. In the Name field on the customer card, you can also choose a different customer who will be invoiced for products that you sell.
On the Payments FastTab, you can assign a payment term, payment method, and a preferred bank account to customers. The Application Method field has two options (Manual or Apply to Oldest) that you can use when applying customer ledger entries. In the Prepayment % field, you can enter a percentage to create prepayment invoices. On the customer card, you can assign a reminder term and finance charge term.
On the Shipping FastTab, you can use the Location Code field to specify from which location that sales will be processed by default. Additional fields exist that are related to shipping, such as a field that provides all details on the shipment process and a field where you can indicate whether items should be Reserved for a customer or not.
The customer card contains an additional FastTab. The Statistics FastTab shows all sales statistics for a customer.
Customer shipping options
If customers have specific shipping preferences, you can configure the following fields:
Location Code - Specifies the location, such as a warehouse, where you can ship items to the customer.
Shipping method code - Specifies which shipment method to use when you ship items to the customer.
Shipping agents - Specifies the shipping agent that you can use to ship items to the customer.
Shipping agent services - Specifies the agent's services. In this field, you can also assign a shipping time to each service.
Shipping time - Specifies how long it takes from when the items are shipped from the warehouse to when they are delivered.
All these options are set in the Shipping FastTab of the customer card.
If your customer has multiple ship-to addresses, you can add a specific default ship-to address by using the Ship-to Code field. You can create as many ship-to addresses as your client maintains.
Customer ship-to addresses
Customers frequently have alternative shipping addresses in addition to their main business address. For example, a subcontractor might require deliveries to several construction sites, or a manufacturing company might have different warehouse and production locations.
To create alternate shipping addresses, on the customer card, choose Related, Customer, and then the Ship-to Addresses action. Select New, and then you can create a new ship-to address.
If you configure a default address by using the Ship-to Code field on a customer card, Business Central will use this address as a default on sales documents. You can always change the address manually.
On the Ship-to Address page, you can also fill in the Salesperson Code field to assign a salesperson to a specific shipping address instead of the billing address. When you select Alternate Shipping Address as the Ship-to option on a sales document, the Salesperson Code on the document is updated with the salesperson from the ship-to address rather than the one from the bill-to address. This approach helps your sales reports reflect the actual geographical distribution of your sales.
Create a new customer
Watch the following video for a demonstration of how to create a new customer.