How to Manage Customers and Contacts?

You can create Customer master in ERPNext in 2 ways :

1. Directly create a Customer
2. Convert Lead to Customer

Directly creating a Customer
To directly create a customer follow the steps as shown in the figure.

The customer master will have tabs as shown below. We will have a look at each tab in detail.

The Basic Info tab in customer will capture the general details of a customer.

The Customer Type field will have two values - Company and Individual. Select Individual if your customer is an individual person and mention his phone number. This helps in updating the contact master automatically on save. If the customer is a company, you can maintain a list of contacts in Contact Details tab on save.

You can categorize your customers into different customer groups and territories which will help you in better analysis.

Save the customer master. This will also create an account head for the customer in Chart of Accounts automatically.

 The customer master will be saved by the customer name by default. You can save the customer by customer codes as well. For this go to Setup --> Global Defaults --> Selling and select Naming Series in "Customer Created By" field. Refresh the system.

The Contact Details tab will have a list of contacts for the customer. Click on the Add Contact button to add more contacts.

 The following screen will appear in a box asking you for details of the contact. Save the contact.

The More Info tab will capture the credit days and credit limit of the customer. If the total outstanding balance exceeds the number of credit days or the due date exceeds the number of credit days, the system will not permit further transactions unless the customer payment is recorded in the Journal Voucher. However, the transactions can be unlocked by the Credit Controller specified in Global Defaults.

The Sales Team tab will capture the sales persons who will be dealing with this customer. If you are dealing with the customer through a partner, mention so in Default Sales Partner. These details will be fetched in sales transactions when this customer is selected.

The Transaction History tab will capture a list of Quotations, Sales Orders, Delivery Notes and Sales Invoices made for this Customer.

Converting Lead to Customer

Open an existing Lead and click on Create Customer button as shown below.

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