Using the customer form

Applies to : Office Accounting Express, Professional

The customer form tracks all contact and background information about each customer as well as displaying information about all transactions with the customer.

Customer form, General tab


The customer form has five different tab pages: General, details Financial Summary, Financial History and User-Defined fields.

General Tab

The General tab holds the basic customer and contact information, plus notes and links to relevant documents. The fields are explained in the table below

Field Description
Customer name (required) The name of the customer. Does not have to be unique (you can have two or more customers with the same name).
File as How the customer name appears on the customer list (e.g. last name, first name)
Addresses A customer may have up to 8 addresses (business, deliver to, ship to, warehouse, home legal postal and other)
Phone and fax numbers A customer can have up to five phone numbers (business, mobile, home, assistant and other) and three fax numbers (business fax, home fax, other fax)
E-mail Office Accounting allows up to three email addresses per customer
Web page address The costumer home page
Active If a customer is active, the customer will be shown on the customer list and on customer drop-downs. Inactive customers are hidden.
Customer since The date you started doing business with the customer.
Contacts Each customer can hold as many contacts as you like, each having a name, title, phone and email address.
Memo Up to 4 KB of internal notes about the customer
Add links button This button is used for linking to additional documents about the customer, such as pictures, contracts or a customer agreement.

Details Tab

The Details tab holds additional customer information, such as VAT information and other information used in the sales flow. The information in these fields is copied to the individual customer documents as defaults, but may be changed.

Customer form, Details tab

Field Description
Salesperson The employee that normally deals with this customer
Credit limit  The maximum balance allowed for this customer (blank is unlimited)
 Price Level  Adjustments to the standard item price for this customer (see the Managing Stock training article)
 Credit rating  Customer credit rating
 Account name  Name on customer bank account
 Sort code  Sort code for bank account
 Account number  Bank account number
 Payment reference  Reference for building societies or BACS payments
 Preferred delivery method  Delivery method for companies that sell physical products
 Preferred payment method  Standard payment method for this customer
 Payment terms  The payment term including cash discounts for this customer
 Customer group  Customer group for reporting purposes
 VAT registration number  Required for EU VAT exempt customers
 Customer VAT code  Specify a VAT code if the customer is taxed differently from other customers
 EU VAT exempt customer  Customers that are exempt from VAT as they are a VAT registered in the EU (outside the UK ).

Financial Summary Tab

The Financial Summary tab gives an instant overview of the financial relations with the customer.

Customer form, Financial Summary tab

The Balance due section gives a detailed view of the aging of the receivables – whether the customer is paying on time or not.

The Payment information section tells you how long it takes the customer on average to pay invoices, based on the amount of time between the invoice date and the customer payment date.

The Sales information section provides you with an overview of how much you have sold to your customer, net of VAT.

Financial History Tab

The financial history tab contains a complete list of all the documents creates for each customer.

Customer form, Financial History tab

You can sort the list by clicking on any of the column headers and you can double-click on a document to open it up.


User-Defined Fields Tab

The User-Defined fields tab allows you to add additional information about your customers as shown in the example below:

Customer form, User-Defined Fields tab

User-defined fields are added by clicking the New Fields button.

You can add up to 21 text fields, one multi-line text field, 8 number fields and 4 checkboxes.

Tip : After the user-defined fields have been added, they can be moved to the other tab pages by using the Modify Layout button. They can also be added to the Invoice form and other documents by modifying their layout. The modify layout functionality of Office Accounting is described in the Customising the screen layout training article.