A customer category groups customers that share characteristics, an industry, a tier, a region, and, more usefully, it carries the defaults those customers should inherit: a price list and a payment term. It is the lever that lets you price and bill a whole segment consistently, and change them all in one edit.
- What a category carries
- How customers inherit its defaults
- Why managing a segment is one edit, not many
How it behaves
Defaults, inherited
A category links to a default price list and a default payment term. Every customer assigned to the category inherits both, so their documents price from the right list and date from the right term without per-customer setup. This is the same indirection described on the Customer page, seen from the category's side: the customer does not hold pricing and terms directly, it gets them through its category.
One edit for a whole segment
Because the defaults live on the category, changing them updates every customer in it at once. Move your wholesale tier to new terms, or point it at a new price list, and the whole segment follows, with per-document overrides still available where a one-off differs.
Edge cases and good practice
- Set the category before anything else on a new customer; pricing and terms flow from it.
- Manage segments through the category, not customer by customer.
- Per-document overrides handle the exceptions without breaking the default.
Related
- Reference: Pricebook (the price list it carries)
- Reference: Customer (which inherits it)
- Reference: Sales Terms (the default term)