A customer is rarely one address and one email. It is 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 — plenty of companies are both, and they should not 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 automatically — payment terms, price list, currency, language, document layout, tax treatment.
- Keep agreed prices so a document never quotes list price to a customer with a contract.
- See everything you have exchanged with them in one timeline: quotes, invoices, payments, emails, notes.
- Attach the paperwork — signed contracts, purchase orders, certificates.
How it works in practice
Create the company once (Accounts → New). Tick whether they are a customer, a supplier, or both. Their number comes from your own numbering sequence, and you can override it if you are migrating from something else and want to keep the old references.
Set the defaults you will otherwise retype. Payment terms, price list, preferred language, which document layout to use, and how tax should be treated for them. Every quote and invoice you raise afterwards starts from those, so a customer in another country with different terms is handled by having been set up correctly once.
Add the people separately from the company. A contact belongs to their company but can also be linked to others — useful for a consultant who works across two of your clients, or a group with a shared finance department. Their role, manager and preferred contact method sit on the record.
Work from the account page. Open a customer and you see their outstanding balance, their recent documents, the activity logged against them and any notes your team has left. Raising a new document for them starts from there rather than from a blank form.
Suppliers get the mirror of all this — their reference numbers for your products, their delivery terms, and the purchase documents you have sent them.
Good to know
- Deleting an account that has documents is not possible, and shouldn’t be — the documents are financial records. Mark them inactive instead; they leave your working lists and keep their history.
- Price agreements sit on price lists, not on the customer. One list can serve many customers, which is what you want when you raise prices and do not fancy editing four hundred records.
- The defaults apply at the moment a document is created, not retroactively. Changing a customer’s payment terms does not rewrite invoices you already sent them.