Customers
As a Wholesaler for a brand, your customer database in Uphance contains company details for your retailers - whether they are purchasing from you in-person or on your showroom. Your customer database includes their addresses and individual contact details. It's also where you can find transaction details relating to particular customers, such as historical sales and open credit notes.
Note: Your customers may also include direct-to-consumer contacts on Shopify or WooCommerce. In this case, our integration can bring those orders into Uphance. See our integrations Article for additional information.
Each customer you add to your organization has some basic details (name, location, website etc) as well as default settings for any sale created for that customer, for example, the default payment terms and invoicing method for the customer.
In addition, each customer can have any number of sub-entries for people associated with the company. For example, billing contacts, delivery contacts or buyers.
Finally, customers can have multiple addresses that can later be selected as billing or shipping addresses during the sales process.
Entering customer data
Click the plus sign next to Contacts located on your left, main vertical menu as shown in Figure 1 below.
Select Customers from the sub-menu as shown in Figure 1 below.
Click the plus sign in the top right corner of the screen.
Enter the basic customer details (only name is absolutely required) on the form as illustrated in Figure 2 below.
Click the "Create Company" to add the customer to your organisation.
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
You'll then be redirected to the customer details page from which you can add details for individuals at the company or billing/shipping addresses.
Uphance also lets you enter contact and address data during the sales workflow, so it isn't strictly necessary to enter all of your customer data before getting started entering sales. You may, however, have an existing spreadsheet of contact data that you want to import.
You can also specify "tags" for your customers to help locate them more quickly in the future. See our Tags Article for additional information.
Note: Currently, you cannot delete a individual contact that has been referenced from a sale or purchase order.
Add an individual contact
Navigate to the associated company for this individual.
Click the "+ Contacts" icon.
Enter at least one piece of contact information (name, phone or email)
Click "Create Contact".
Repeat steps 2 thru 4 until you have all contacts entered for this customer.
Click the Edit icon if you wish to make changes to that customer contact information.
These contacts will be displayed for you when you are creating a Sale. You can choose whether they are Billing contacts or Shipping contacts.
Add an address
To enter the addresses associated with your customer contact (billing or shipping -- could be multiple),
Navigate to the associated company for this individual.
Click the "+ Locations" icon.
In the Location box, you may specify a location name if the customer has more than one location (e.g. West Coast Facility, East Coast Facility). This is an optional field. If the customer has one location, you may leave this field blank.
Select the contact name of the person associated with this address.
Enter at least one line of the address.
Click "Create Location".
Repeats steps 2 - 6 until all addresses have been entered.
Edit location
To edit a location,
Click the Edit icon next to the location you want to change.
Make the desired changes to the location record.
Feel free to set the location as a default for the shipping or billing.
Click Update location.
How contacts and addresses are applied to sales
When building a sale, you will be prompted to select address and contact data to fulfill various roles in the workflow (such as a customer's shipping contact or billing address).
Be aware that when selecting an address, Uphance copies the address to the sale. Therefore, updating the address in the customer database will not automatically update the address on the associated sales. This makes it possible to override or adjust addresses on a sale by sale basis. It also preserves existing data in the sales database even if your customer's addresses change.
In contrast, when associating an individual (a person) with a sale (for example, the buyer), Uphance doesn't make a copy of the contact data (phone number, email etc) and always shows you the latest data from the customer database.
Alert Messages for Specific Customers
You can also configure Alert Messages for your Customers that will appear next to the company name throughout Uphance (e.g. warning about a non-paying customer). To configure these alerts, navigate to your Contacts>Customers and open a particular customer. Type the Alert message you want displayed in the "Alert Message" field.
Agents
Link "Agents" to your customers. Agents are people that have an Agent subscription and share access to your company data. The Agents are setup under Settings>Users & Permissions.
Xero product sales account code
You can override the Xero nominal accounting code to use for invoices for specific customers. Select the account code you want to use with this customer that will sync to your Xero Accounting software if you have Xero integration enabled.
Default Discounts & Fees
Use the Default percentage discount if you always want to give a specific customer a special discount. Also, use default card fee percentage field if you want to charge an increase for processing their credit card transactions.
Courier
Specify your customer's courier name and account number. As noted, this information will be displayed on all Sales Order paperwork.
Default Tax Level and VAT Number
The default tax level is set per customer as the rate could be different for each customer. The tax percentage defined in this field is the amount that is added to all customer invoices and is shown on all other documents for that customer as well including their sales orders, returns and credit notes.
You can control the "label" associated with this tax rate under "Settings>Paperwork". As examples, you may want to call it VAT Tax or "Federal and State Tax" or "Customer Tax and My Company Sales Tax". Otherwise, the default labeling on documents will just say "tax". See our Paperwork Knowledge Article for additional information.
Also see our Tax Home Currency Knowledge Article for more information on how and where that tax is applied.
Default Payment Terms
Specify the payment terms for this specific customer by clicking on the drop down list. The Payment Terms you have defined under Settings>Invoices will be displayed. Once you select a default payment term, the Default payment terms field will automatically update to the description. For more information on updating the payment terms under Settings, please see our Invoices Knowledge Article.
The Due Date field for Invoices is automatically calculated for invoices based on what is set as the default under Settings>Invoices in Payment Terms. The Payment Terms defined within the customer profiles calculate due dates for the Invoice PDFs and are displayed on the paperwork. Edit your invoice to modify an invoice due date or Payment Term as needed.
If a selected payment term has an Early payment discount and the Payment was created before the due date, the Invoice will be indicated noted with "Mark settlement discount taken".
If you need to remove the settlement discount from your invoice, select: "Unmark Settlement Discount Taken" from the drop down Documents menu within your Invoice:
Warehouse
Specify which Warehouse you want to use for primary product distribution for this customer.
Other Information
Specify your customer's website, country, city and other notes about your customer that may be helpful in conducting business with this customer.
Tags
Apply Customer tags to quickly locate your customer or classify them by type. See our "Managing Tags" Knowledge Article for more information.
Favorites
Your customer may have "favorite" products they order from you on a regular basis. You can add these to your customer profile so that you do not have to search for them when your customer places orders. This feature works very similar to the "Related Products" feature on Products. See our Knowledge Article on Creating/Editing a New Product.
To add Favorites to your customer profile,
Scroll down to the Favorite Products section within your customer contact.
Click Add Product
Browse for a Select the Product.
Repeat steps 1-3 to add as many favorites to your customer profile as you would like.
NOTE: For your eCommerce/Showroom, the "favorite" products will appear for your customers as well if the products are in a Season that is not marked "hidden" and is marked to "Show in Showroom" under Settings>Season.
Open Credit Notes & Sales History
See all Open Credit Notes and Sales History for this customer. Click on any of the Credit Notes or Sales Orders to gain visibility into further details about that transaction.
You can also launch a New Sale for the customer from this page below Sales History by clicking "New Sale".
