Customers, and keeping the record honest

You’ll need: Contacts, Invoices, Orders — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Everything in this course points at a contact. This closing lesson is about the record itself, because a sales system is only as good as the customer list underneath it.

One customer, one record

Essentials made this point and sales is where it bites. Every quote, order, invoice, payment and return references a contact. Split that customer across two records and you split their history: two balances, neither right, and no way to answer what they owe you.

Search before creating. Every time. Search matches partial words, so two or three letters is enough. The ten seconds it costs is the cheapest insurance in the system.

An order from a stranger is fine

A customer ordering from your website at midnight is not in your address book, and the order does not require them to be. Converting that order to an invoice creates the contact.

Which means the duplicate risk is real precisely here: the same person orders twice with slightly different details and becomes two customers. Before converting, check whether you already know them.

What the customer’s record tells you

Because documents reference the contact, their record is the whole relationship: what they were quoted, what they ordered, what was invoiced, what they paid, what came back. That is the screen to open before a difficult conversation — not to win an argument, but to be the party who actually knows what happened.

Archive, never delete, never reuse

A customer who stopped buying gets archived: out of your working lists, still attached to every document they were ever part of.

Never rename an old customer into a new one. Every invoice, payment and return they were party to silently becomes somebody else’s history. It looks tidy on the day and corrupts your accounts permanently.

You have finished

That is Sales & Customers. You now know which document answers which question, why the links between them matter, how fulfilment is recorded honestly, what an invoice is and why it does not move, how payments settle against invoices rather than replacing them, what a return has to record, and how to ask the reports a useful question.

Next in the catalogue is Purchasing & Suppliers, the same discipline pointed the other way — and after that Inventory & Stock, which is where the goods in this course actually move.

Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.