Contacts: Converting your Contact to a Customer

In the last entry for this series, we covered quoting our contacts. Once we receive that very important order from our prospective Customer, it’s time to complete the Customer Card creation and get that Sales Order confirmation back out the door.

Customer creation is often a combined effort between the Sales and Accounting Teams. Many companies will implement a workflow approval process to allow Sales to gather the information to begin their process and Accounting to confirm the Customer Card created captures the information most important to them before orders are entered. Remember, the contact information listed on the Customer Card belongs to the Accounting team.

To begin the process of converting a Contact to a Quote, highlight the Company contact and select Actions \ Create As \ Customer.

Where templates are necessary to allow quoting against Contacts, they are optional for Customer creation. Creating templates can help with the data entry and overall time it takes to approve a new Customer.

The Order can now be updated with details like Requested Delivery Date, Promised Delivery Date, additional shipping and billing information, etc. If Dimensions were added during the Customer Card creation, they will also need to be added to either the Quote (before conversion) or the Order (after conversion).

From the Contact Card, we can see the new Customer Card created by using the Business Relations function.

The Accounting team can now review the new Customer Card and make any changes to complete the process. This can include the posting information, Dimensions, updates to Credit Limits and Payment Terms and updating (creating) the Primary Contact. As mentioned previously, the Contact Information on the Customer Card should be their Accounts Payable contact.

Once the Customer Card creation is complete, Sales can move forward with converting the Sales Quote previously created on the Contact. Overall, consider the Contact area of the system for your Sales team.

This closes the loop on using the Contact to manage prospective Customers without creating Customers that may never be used and expanding on the entire company’s use of the system to gather multiple contacts for any given Company.