How to Maintain Customer/Prospects

After setting up new company and its charts of account we will establish subsidiary ledger for account receivable. We will use maintain customer/prospect window to enter information related to the company whom you want to sale your goods and services or you can provide information about people with whom you want to do business.

To open the window click customer prospect in maintain menu.

By clicking on customer prospect following window will appear. This window gives us five tabs

·       General

·       Sales default

·       Payment defaults

·       Custom fields

·       History

The upper tab is known as “HEADER” here you have to write customer id and name. The minimum requirement for saving a customer account is customer id, name and general sales account.

In “General Tab”  we will provide information regarding customer contact, address where bill and shipment will be send, customer type…. You can categorize customer according to their type. For e.g. if a customer purchases in bulk you can give them a same customer type after Providing the required information we will click on sales default to proceed

By clicking on sales default following window appears. In sales default tab we will provide information about sales rep, General sales account, (you can select account by clicking on the look up button) purchase order no, shipping method (Here you can select shipping carrier you want to use for the customer), Resale no ( resale no are used by company’s who wants to sale and purchase taxable items) , level of pricing(you can select from various pricing level that are given),  Terms (you can opt for basic customer payment term or you can set different terms for your customer). After filling all these fields click on payment defaults.

By clicking on the payment default following wizard appears on the screen. Here we will provide payment details of our customer. We can change this information at proceeding stage if required. After filling all the fields given in this wizard select “Custom field” tab to proceed.

By clicking custom field following wizard appears. In this tab you can provide some other information about your customer. You can also add some extra information regarding your customer. An extra field is given for this purpose. The next tab is for history.

To see the current history of your old customer selects the “History Tab”. By selecting history tab following window appears.  In this tab you can see the last invoice date and amount, last payment date and amount and last statement date.

Default Information for Customers

Information in customer default applies to your entire customers until and unless you specify it for a specific customer. By maintaining customer defaults before adding a customer you can save your time as same information can be used for over and over again for majority of your customer.

To open customer defaults in peach tree select default information from the maintain menu and click customers from default information. Following screen appears by clicking customers.

By clicking customer default following wizard appears on the screen. This wizard provides  us five tabs.

·         Payment terms

·         Account aging

·         Custom fields

·         Finance charges

·         Pay method

In PAYMENT TERM tab you will provide information regarding your payment terms and conditions. In the above figure the standard terms for payment are given on the left hand corner that are,

·        COD

·        Prepaid

·        Due in no of days

·        Due on day of next month

·        Due at end of month

By COD wemean cash on delivery. You will select this option if payment is made when goods will be delivered.

Select the option of PREPAID if you receive payment in advance.

You will select the term DUE IN NO OF DAYS  if you are going to receive payment from your customer after a certain no of days. Here you will write net due in( no of days for which the payment is due), Discount in(if payment is made with in the days written here discount would be given), Discount( this field is for discount rate), Credit limit(you will set the credit limit for your customer if amount exceeds that credit limit you will receive a warning message).

The next term is DUE ON DAY OF NEXT MONTH. It means that you will receive payment from your customer on some specific day of next month.

The last term is DUE AT THE END OF MONTH. You will select this term if you want to get payment from your customer at the end of same month you are making sales.

                                    

The next tab is for ACCOUNT AGING. In this tab you will make provision for your Bad debts.

·        Select Invoice date if you want to make provision when sales were made and revenue was recognized in the books of accounts

·        Select Due date if you want to make provision for bad debts when invoice become due.

The next tab is for CUSTOM FIELD. Here you can provide extra information about your customer.

The next tab is for FINANCE CHARGES. By this we mean late charges once you have active finance charges you can set terms and conditions to calculate these charges. Here you will provide the following information.

·        On invoice date(grace days after which charges will be applied)

·        Days overdue up to $(amount on which interest will be charged after the grace period)

·        Annual interest rate

·        On balance above that(interest rate if balance will exceed)

·        Minimum finance charges(minimum amount that would be charged to a customer if the payment is late)

We will select late charges if we want this to appear on invoices.

The last tab is for PAY METHOD. It means that by which mode you are going to receive payment from your customer. You can add up to 10 methods for receiving payments.