SETTING UP CUSTOMERS
At this point you have set up your company, including a general ledger and bank accounts, created a database of vendors, and created an inventory database. The final mandatory step in the setup process is to create a database of customers using the Customer File Maintenance form (Figure 38) found under File Maintenance 
Customer File.
The Customer File Maintenance form requires you enter basic information such as billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and contacts. You will need to assign an Account number to each customer, and this can be drawn from your pre-existing system. The Status field has a drop-down arrow which allows you to select from Active, Inactive, and Collections. In the Salesman field you enter the ID of the salesperson to whom this customer is assigned. The Tax Location field is where you will enter the code that defines the sales tax rate for this customer.
In the center of the form, you see another box with three tabs. The Billing tab (Figure 39) allows you to enter information such as credit terms, statement frequency, credit limit, etc. The Payment Information section of this tab will display the date and amount of the last payment received from this customer. Note these two fields do not allow you to enter data, they are updated automatically when a payment is posted for the customer.
The Billing Acct field allows you to assign this customer’s invoices to a different account for billing purposes. This can be used to set up a “summary billing” account which aggregates several accounts into one for purposes such as issuing statements and tracking accounts receivable.
The Categories tab (Figure 40) displays six textboxes, each textbox initially labeled UnAssigned. Similar to the six categories we saw on the Inventory File Maintenance form, selecting options on this tab assigns the customer to categories which allow for filtering report and query results.
Click on the Pricing tab (Figure 41). The first textbox is labeled Default Pricing Type and has a drop-down arrow that provides you with six options: Price 1 through Price 5, and Cost Plus. The first five options correspond to the five Price Brackets we created when setting up inventory items in the Inventory File Maintenance form. You can now see how these Price Brackets are going to be utilized: by assigning each customer to one of the five brackets, we can create at least five different price structures for our customer base.
The sixth option lets us define a special price structure for the individual customer based on a percentage markup over the Sales Cost of any item. If you select the Cost Plus option in the Default Pricing Type field and then enter a percentage in the Cost Plus % field just below, any item sold to this customer will be priced based on the Sales Cost with the percentage markup you indicate here.
Below the Cost Plus % field is a textbox labeled Default A/R G/L. This field will display the default A/R code you entered in the Configuration File Maintenance form. If you wish accounts receivable from the customer be debited to a different A/R account, you can make the change here (hit F3 for a list of G/L codes).
The last textbox on the tab, Invoice Item Type, allows you to choose which identifying number appears with the item description on invoices to this customer. It can be your item number, the vendor’s item number, or a UPC code.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the Pricing tab which allow you to print an Order Guide or a Load Sheet for the customer
To the right of the tabbed section, you will see a column of buttons, the first of which is labled Comments. We discussed this functionality in detail when we looked at the Vendor File Maintenance form in Section II F. The Comments button here works exactly the same.
As always, click on the Save button (or press Alt and S) to save each customer record.
 Setting Up Sales Tax Codes
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Setting Up Negotiated Pricing
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