Company Specific Customer Information Card Single Dialogs Workspace

Use this workspace to enter and maintain information about your company-specific customers, such as name, address, and general information used to process customer sales orders.

Maconomy identifies a company-specific customer by a combination of customer number (set up in the Customer Information Card workspace) and company number. Certain information about the customer is unique to the customer/company combination.

A company-specific customer is a division of a customer number, meaning that certain information about this customer can be made dependent on which company in Maconomy is responsible for the customer in question. For example, you might create a customer information card for a customer that is used by different parts of your organization (company); in that case, you use a company-specific customer for each combination of customer and company. This means that you can change certain information for each company-specific customer on the associated information card. For example, one payment mode is used in connection with sales from company A to customer X, and another payment mode is used in connection with sales from company B to the same customer. In this way, all customers can use a common customer number for any given number of company-specific customers, while each of the customers is linked to their own settling company. Maconomy distinguishes company-specific customers by the combination of customer number and settling company, not by their customer numbers.

This is especially useful if you consider customers that you create using the Customer Information Card to be "enterprise customers" that should Maconomy should use as a kind of template for the creation of company-specific customers that you create in the associated settling companies. You can use a customer as template if you have not entered a settling company for the "enterprise customer" in the Customer Information Card workspace. However, although you entered a settling company for the "enterprise customer," you can still use this customer as a template for the creation of company-specific customers. However, the new company-specific customer inherits the settling company from the "enterprise customer," when you do not enter a settling company for each company-specific customer.

The following description illustrates the use of this workspace.

Two settling companies want the information from an "enterprise customer's" information card, but they also need to enter data in certain data fields, such as Att., Phone, or Delivery Terms. By creating company-specific customers that are linked to an existing customer (the "enterprise customer"), the two settling companies can access a large amount of information inherited from the existing customer; however, they can only change the data fields that they need to change. The company-specific customers thus have the same customer number as the "enterprise customer," but the settling company number and the contents of certain fields, such as Att. and Phone, are different.

In addition, the setup of linking rules in the Linking Rules workspace in the Set-Up module defines the information that company specific-customers inherit from customers. The setup of linking rules also defines the information that you can change in this workspace. For example, if you create a linking rule from the table "Customer" to the table "CompanyCustomer," and that linking rules specifies that all customer information, except for a few fields such as Att. and Phone, should be inherited by company-specific customers that have the standard linking method Full, Maconomy copies the relevant information to the company-specific customer's information cards using this linking rule. The selected linking rule thus determines which fields you can change on the company-specific customer information card. The ability to enter, change, or view a value in each field depends on the setup of the linking rule that you assigned to the customer, if any. For more information about linking rules, see the description of the Linking Rules workspace in the Set-Up module.

The creation of company-specific customers in this workspace, however, depends on whether or not you selected the Centralized Customer Creation Only system parameter in the Set-up module. If you select this system parameter, you can only create company-specific customers if you already created them as customers in the Customer Information Card workspace. If you did not select this parameter, there are no restrictions as to the creation of company-specific customers in this workspace, and the creation of a company-specific customer automatically results in the creation of a customer that has the same information as the company-specific customer, if this customer did not already exist.

In addition, if you select the Aut. company specific customer creation system parameter, Maconomy automatically creates company-specific customers when anyone tries to enter information on such non-existing company-specific customers. If you did not select this parameter and someone makes an entry on a non-existing company-specific customer, Maconomy displays an error message, and you must to create the company-specific customer manually in the Company Specific Customer Information Card workspace, before you try to make any entries.

For auditing purposes, it is recommended that you print and file the Company Specific Customer Information Card each time that you change information here or in the Payment Information workspace. To print the Company Specific Customer Information Card, use the Print This function in the File menu.