Customer

Last updated: June 20, 2026

The customer is the master record for a business you sell to. It is created once and then referenced by every quotation, order, delivery and invoice, carrying the settings that quietly shape each sale: who to bill, in what currency, against which receivable account, and on what default terms. Build it well and the rest of selling fills itself in.

What you will learn
  • How the customer sits among its contacts, category and documents
  • What each tab of the customer record holds
  • Why terms and pricing come through the category, not the customer
  • How the active flag and soft delete protect history
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A customer sits between its category, its contacts and the documents that reference it simplified mockup

Anatomy of the screen

The customer is a tabbed record. The main Company Information tab is organised as:

  • Information – id, code, brand name, description and the type, individual or company.
  • Registration – registration number, registered name and address, website and logo.
  • Category – the customer category this record belongs to, which is where defaults actually live (below).
  • Contact persons – the people at this customer, listed here and maintained as their own records.
  • Custom fields – any tenant-specific fields you have added.
  • Accounting – the default currency and the receivables ledger this customer posts to.
  • Internals – attachments, notes and the active flag.

Further tabs hold the customer's additional details and a running history of their documents, orders and payments, so the record doubles as a relationship dashboard.

How it behaves

Defaults come through the category

This is the key design choice. A customer does not hold payment terms or a pricelist directly. Instead it belongs to a category, and the category carries the default term and price list. Picking the category sets the defaults; changing a category updates every customer in it at once. Per-document overrides are still allowed, but the sensible default is one edit away for a whole segment.

No status machine, just active and soft delete

A customer has no draft-or-posted lifecycle. It is simply active or not, and deleting it is a soft delete: the record is hidden but retained, so historical documents that reference it stay intact and reportable. You never lose the trail behind a customer you have stopped trading with.

Created on the fly

Because quoting often comes before formal onboarding, a customer can be created inline while raising a quotation, then fleshed out later. The code is generated automatically if you leave it blank.

Worked example

You assign Acme to the “Wholesale” category, which defaults to net-30 terms and the wholesale pricelist. Every quote and invoice for Acme now prices and dates itself correctly with no per-document fiddling. When Acme moves to monthly terms, you change the category once and the whole wholesale book follows.

Edge cases and good practice

  • Set the category first. It is the single most useful field, because terms and pricing flow from it.
  • Individual versus company. The type affects how the record is named and addressed; set it correctly for clean documents and e-Invoice.
  • Deactivate, do not delete, dormant customers. Soft delete keeps history, but the active flag is the cleaner way to retire a customer you may trade with again.

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