Defining Customer Options

The definition of a customer is someone (or something) with financial obligations with your company. These obligations ensue because the customer has agreed to purchase goods or services at an agreed price.

You may be surprised to learn that there is no "customer" record in the system. Rather, the system subdivides customer information into the following records:

• Person. The person record holds demographic information about your customers and every other individual or business with which your company has contact. For example, in addition to customers, person records also exist for landlords, contractors, accountants at corporate customers, guarantors of customers, energy distributors, collection agencies, etc.
• Account. Accounts are the entities for which bills are produced and therefore you must create at least one account for every person who has financial obligations with your company. The account record contains information that controls when the bills are created and how the bills are formatted.
• Service Agreement. Think of a service agreement as a contract between your company and the customer. The service agreement contains the terms and conditions controlling how the bill details are created. Every account will have at least one service agreement (otherwise, nothing will appear on the account's bills).

Before you can define persons, accounts, and service agreements, you must set up the control tables defined in this section.