A customer is rarely one address and one email. It’s a billing address and three delivery sites, two people who approve things and one who pays them, a price you agreed eighteen months ago, and a preference for invoices in German.
All of that lives on one record here, and every document you raise picks it up without being told.
What you can do
- Keep customers, suppliers, or both on one record, because plenty of companies are both and they shouldn’t be two entries you keep in sync by hand.
- Hold as many addresses as a company has - billing, delivery, sites - and pick the right one per document.
- Store the people, not just the company: their role, who they report to, how to reach them.
- Set defaults that apply themselves: payment terms, price list, currency, language, document layout, tax treatment.
- Keep agreed prices, so a document never quotes list price to a customer who negotiated one.
- Add a customer from the invoice you’re typing, without losing the half-built document.
- Be warned before you create a second record for a company whose tax number you already hold.
- Have a tax number checked against the country it belongs to, without it being sent anywhere.
- See everything you’ve exchanged with them on one timeline: quotes, invoices, payments, conversations.
- Keep tasks against a customer or supplier, get reminded before one is due, and see every open task in the company on one list.
How it works in practice
Add the company once (CRM → Accounts). Name, registration and tax numbers, and the addresses you actually use. From then on every document you raise for them starts from what’s on this record rather than from a blank form.
Give them their own terms. Payment terms, price list, currency, invoice language and document layout all sit on the customer. Your German customer gets a German invoice on your German layout at the price you agreed with them, and nobody has to remember any of that at the moment of raising it.
Keep the people separate from the company. Contacts have their own names, roles and details, so “who signs this off” and “who pays it” can be two different people, and a document can be addressed to the right one.
Add them while you’re raising the invoice. A customer who phones an order in doesn’t exist in your records yet, and stopping to create one is how the half-typed invoice gets lost. The picker on the document offers three ways through it: the + beside it, typing a name that matches nothing and taking the Create option, or filling the address block and saving those details as a customer. Whichever you use, it starts from what you’ve already typed, and the new customer lands on the document as if you’d picked them from the list.
You get told before you duplicate somebody. Type a tax number that another record already holds and the form names the company holding it, with a button to use that one instead. Two records for one company is the mess that shows up months later, split across two statements.
Tax numbers are checked the way each country writes them. The field is named after your customer’s country rather than after your own tax setup, so you’re asked for an ABN in Australia and a VAT registration number in Europe. Some countries put a check digit in the number, and a mistyped character gets caught as you type it. Others only have a shape to go on, and the form says that is all it checked rather than showing you a tick it hasn’t earned. Nothing is sent anywhere to do this.
The US field asks for exactly what a US business has. There is no national sales tax number, and a state seller’s permit has no common format, so what you type saves exactly as typed and the form says it wasn’t checked. The only thing that stops a save is a number that contradicts its own country’s published format. Leave it empty, or enter one from a country nobody has a rule for, and it saves.
Keep the follow-ups on the record. A task belongs to the customer or supplier it’s about: call back about the quote, chase the insurance certificate. Give it a due date and somebody to do it, and they can be emailed when it’s assigned, once you’ve set up the email template for it. Set a reminder anything from fifteen minutes to a day ahead and it turns up in their notifications before the task is due.
See everybody’s list in one place (CRM → Activities → Tasks). Every task across every customer and supplier: yours by default, or the whole company’s, narrowed to what’s overdue or due this week, soonest first. Tasks are still created from the record they belong to, because a task is always about somebody.
Look them up later. The record shows what you’ve sent, what’s still owed and what was said, which is usually the real question when somebody’s name comes up in a meeting.
Good to know
- One company, one record. If somebody is both a customer and a supplier, tick both rather than creating two entries. Two entries is how a balance ends up split across records nobody realises are the same firm.
- Defaults on the customer beat the general defaults, and anything set on the document beats both. Worth knowing when a price isn’t what you expected.
- An email address is optional. A cash customer written down at the counter can be saved without one. They just can’t be emailed a document until somebody adds it.
- Deleting is soft. A customer with documents against them can’t simply vanish, because those documents have to stay explicable.
- An EU VAT number can be checked against the official registry if you switch that connector on. See connecting other systems.