Customer accounts

Set up customer accounts for your regular customers. Cash or retail customers have no customer account, so must pay for their orders immediately.

If you want to provide your customers with credit, and monitor your business relationship with them you must create a customer account for them. The customer account contains:

The customer's name, address and a contact's details.
The currency in which they conduct their business.
Their credit limit with you.
Your payment terms and credit reference information.
Pricing and discount details.

Each account must have a code, name and short name. All other details can either be left blank or are inherited from the Customer Defaults and Settings. You can keep or change these default details as you create each account.

Some of these default details are also applied to individual transactions, but you can amend these when you enter the transaction.

The following table shows how information is passed from settings to accounts, and from accounts to transactions.

How default settings are applied to accounts and transactions
Customer settings	Customer account	Transaction
Default VAT code	Default VAT code	VAT code
Settlement Discount	Settlement Discount	Settlement Discount
Payment Terms	Payment Terms	Due Date (Payment Terms)
Terms Agreed	Terms Agreed
	Default Nominal Account	Nominal Account

Amending accounts

Any changes you make to an account will only affect transactions that you enter after you've made the changes. For example, if you change the settlement discount details, this doesn't affect the discount details already entered on transactions.

You can't change the account Code once the account has been saved. If you've entered a code incorrectly and haven't yet entered any transactions for the account, you can delete the account and recreate it.

Once transactions have been entered for an account:

You can't change the currency.
You can't delete the account.

Foreign currency accounts

You can create customer accounts in any currency. To create an account for a customer in another currency, set the account Currency, and then set the Country code and VAT details on the Trading tab of the account. All transactions are then recorded in the customer's currency.

When payments are allocated to transactions, any changes in value due to exchange rate fluctuations are dealt with automatically.

Put accounts on hold

You can put accounts on hold when you want to temporarily suspend an account and prevent new transactions being posted to it. This is useful if you need to resolve a query or wait for a payment to be received.

An account can be put on hold at any time. Once on hold, new transactions cannot be entered for the account. Existing transactions can continue to be processed, although you will see a warning to inform you that an account is on hold.

See Change customer status (hide or put on hold).

Hide accounts

Once you've stopped trading with a customer, you can give the account a Hidden status.

Hiding an account prevents them being selected in error. This means the account can't be selected when you're entering or processing transactions, invoices or sales orders.

See Change customer status (hide or put on hold).

Customer alerts

You can set up alerts on a customer account, to show messages whenever you deal with that customer. For example, if a customer has specific requirements, you can set up a reminder message that will be displayed whenever you enter an order for that customer.

When you set up an alert on the customer account, you can choose to show the alert for particular activities.

You can choose to show alerts when entering invoices or credit notes, sales orders and returns, quotations and pro forma invoices, and for customer price enquiries.

Customer alerts are displayed for these activities in both the Web Portal (where available) and the Sage 200 desktop.

Alerts are specific to an individual customer, and you can have multiple alerts for each customer.

See Customer alerts.