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Introduction

Information about your Customers, Suppliers and all other companies with whom you have some contact is stored in the Customer register. Storing Customers, Suppliers and other companies together in one register means that you can make full use of the Calendar and Task Manager with companies of all kinds. It also means that you will only have to maintain a single record for a company who is both a Customer and a Supplier.

Throughout these web pages, the term "Customer" is usually used when describing the use of a record in the Customer register in a sales context, while "Supplier" is used in a purchase context. "Supplier" implies that the Supplier box in the header of the Customer record has been checked.

On the sales side, you can group Customers of a similar type together using Customer Categories. Similarly, on the purchase side you can group Suppliers of a similar type together using Supplier Categories. All Suppliers belonging to the same Category can be given the same default Creditor Account, saving you the work of having to specify this for all Suppliers individually. A company that is both a Customer and Supplier can belong both to a Customer Category and to a Supplier Category.

Prior to FirstOffice version 4.1, Customers and Suppliers were stored in separate registers. In this version, the two registers were made into one. When you update to this or a later version, you can use the 'Convert Suppliers to Customers' Maintenance function to bring the information in the two registers together. This is described on the Combining Customers and Suppliers page.