Customers, and keeping the record honest
Before you start, open these. They are all under Sales in the menu: Contacts, Invoices and Orders.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
Everything in this course points at a contact. This last lesson is about that record, because a sales system is only as good as the customer list underneath it.
One customer, one record
You heard this in Essentials. Sales is where it bites.
Every quote, order, invoice, payment and return points at a contact. Split one customer across two records and you split their history. Now you have two balances, neither of them right, and no way to say what that person owes you.
Search before you create. Every single time.
Search matches part of a word, so two or three letters is enough. Those ten seconds are the cheapest insurance in the whole system.
An order from someone you do not know is fine
A customer orders from your website at midnight. They are not in your address book, and the order does not need them to be. Turning that order into an invoice creates the contact for you.
Which is exactly where duplicates come from. The same person orders twice, types their details slightly differently, and becomes two customers.
So before you turn an order into an invoice, check whether you already know them.
What a customer’s record tells you
Because every document points at the contact, their record holds the whole relationship. What you quoted them. What they ordered. What you invoiced. What they paid. What came back.
That is the screen to open before a difficult conversation. Not to win an argument. To be the person in the room who actually knows what happened.
Archive. Never delete, never reuse
A customer who stopped buying gets archived. They come out of your working lists and stay attached to every document they were ever part of.
Never rename an old customer into a new one. Every invoice, payment and return that old customer was part of quietly becomes somebody else’s history.
It looks tidy on the day. It wrecks your accounts for good.
You have finished
That is the end of Sales and Customers. Here is what you now know.
- Which document answers which question.
- Why the links between documents matter.
- How to record honestly what you actually sent.
- What an invoice is, and why it does not change.
- How payments settle against invoices instead of replacing them.
- What a return has to record.
- How to ask the reports a useful question.
Next is Purchasing and Suppliers, which is the same discipline pointed the other way. After that comes Inventory and Stock, where the goods in this course actually move.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.