Uphance makes it easy to add customers' (including your B2B buyers) contacts to your organization and manage their data with ease. This makes it easy for you to find historical sales data about a specific customer's order.

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.  

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 system can save the default setting for payment terms and the invoicing method for a particular customer.

Keep in mind that a customer can have multiple contacts associated with it. So, what's the difference between a customer and a contact?

A customer can be an individual or a business entity you transact business with. A contact, on the other hand, is an individual you exchange communications with.

For instance, the front-desk officer for, say, ABC clothing store is a contact, while the store itself is your customer.

This means a customer in your organization can have multiple contacts. Each contact can be assigned a specific role which could be Billing, Shipping, or Buying.

To add a customer, navigate to Customer Relationships >> Customers >> Actions >> Add New Customer.

Enter the required information and click the Create Customer button.

When you've created the customer, the next step is to add contacts to the customer's data.

To add contacts for a customer, locate the customer and add the contact like so:

You can assign roles and give collection access to your contacts from here.

Do you want to import your contacts in bulk? Uphance lets you do just that.

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 an individual contact that has been referenced from a sale or purchase order.

It's important to enter your customer's location/address into the system, as you will need this when creating a sales order.

Luckily, adding a customer's location is straightforward.

You can always edit the location details later on.

When creating a sales order, you will be prompted to select the address and contact information.

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 for each sales order. 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.

If you sell wholesale to customers that distribute, you can easily add them as distributors. To do so, edit the customer's details and check the Is this customer a distributor radio button.

When you raise an invoice for an order for that distributor, it will show up on their profile page.

You can also configure Alert Messages for your customers. This message will be displayed as a warning icon and will show up wherever the customer appears in Uphance.

A typical use case for this is notifying a customer about an invoice overdue for payment. You can also use it to indicate some other problem with the customer or supplier that needs to be kept in mind.

To configure these alerts, navigate to your Customer Relationships>Customers and open a particular customer.  Type the Alert message you want displayed in the "Alert Message" field and update.

You can link a customer to a particular agent by selecting one from this field:

Use the Default percentage discount if you always want to give a specific customer a special discount.  Also, use the default card fee percentage field if you want to charge a particular customer a card processing fee.

The other things you can do from the customer setup page include setting a credit limit, selecting a carrier, picking a warehouse, etc.

Your customer may have "favorite" products they order from you regularly. 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 a favorite product to a customer's profile:

You can easily see all the credit notes in the name of a particular customer on the customer's information page.

For some reason, you may want to take out a customer from your system. Maybe you no longer do business with them. Perhaps, they are on a hiatus, albeit temporarily.

Whatever the reason, you can delete or deactivate a customer. When you delete a customer, all their data will be purged from the system. But if you deactivate, their data will be intact, only that you can't transact with them until you reactivate.

To delete/deactivate, open the customer and click which you want to do. Keep in mind, though, that you can't delete a customer with an assigned order, material, or invoice. You'd have to delete those before deleting the customer.