Introduction - Customers

A customer is who you ship to, and the record that carries their addresses, terms and order history.

In Inventory a customer matters mostly for one reason: they are the destination. Every sales order, package and shipment resolves to an address that lives here, so an address entered once is an address the warehouse can trust.

Two addresses, and they are often different

Billing addresswhere the invoice goes

Head office, or an accounts payable department that has never seen a pallet.

Shipping addresswhere the goods go

The site, the depot, the yard. This is what prints on the packing slip and what the carrier is given.

A customer can hold several shipping addresses, which is the normal case for anybody with more than one site. The order chooses which one, so getting them onto the record beforehand saves the warehouse a phone call.

What the record tells you

• Their open sales orders, and therefore what stock is already reserved for them.
• What has shipped and what is still sitting as a package.
• Their payment terms, which decide whether a new order should go out at all.
• A rate list, if they are on contract pricing.