Initial Set Up – Customers And Suppliers

Purpose: To create the customer and supplier records in the sales and purchase ledgers ready to post transactions.

Preparation:

• Review the standing data in your current system.
• Is this complete, correct and up to date?
• Consider sending a circular to customers and/or suppliers asking them to confirm their names, addresses and contact details.
• Do you need to transfer all accounts now?
• Consider transferring only those accounts with live balances and outstanding orders.
• Keep a record of all other accounts so that these can be created easily at a later date.
• Review the transaction data in your current system. Is this complete and correct?
• Review the ledgers for slow moving and credit and debit balances.
• Resolve as many outstanding issues as possible and adjust the ledgers accordingly.
• Decide on an Account Code format and structure – your new product allows up to 8 characters for each Account Code
• The more characters you use, the more accounts you can create and the better you can identify account types by the code structure.
• The software will display these codes alphanumeric order in search forms, listings and reports.
• The Discovery Wines demonstration company uses a 3-character alphanumeric account code for both Sales and Purchase ledger accounts.
• A customer whose name begins with ‘A’ could have, for example, the Code A07.
• Using this combination of letters and numbers can create up to 2574 (26 letters x 99 number each) accounts in total, with 99 for each letter of the alphabet.
• For larger companies you could use 5 Alpha and 3 Numeric e.g. Smith001 etc This makes for more accurate aphabetical sorting in customer lists
• Decide on a standard format for standing data (are you going to use upper, lower or proper case entries?).

Enter the Data …

Enter the names and addresses etc. of your customers into the sales ledger and the names and addresses etc. of your suppliers into the purchase ledger – see Create & Edit Customer Accounts and Create and Edit Supplier Accounts.

or Import the Data

If you have a large amount of Customer & Supplier data which you can convert to a spreadsheet format, you may be able to Import it with our CSV Import tool rather than enter it – see Import Customer Data, Import Supplier Data. You can also create consistency in formatting using MS Excel formatting, as well as eliminating input errors.