About Setting Up Customer Records

Accounts Receivable can maintain very detailed records about your customers, and provides several options you can use to customize your records to match your business requirements.

This article provides an overview to guide you through the customer setup process in Accounts Receivable, and directs you to topics that provide more information about each step.

Add Supporting Records before Setting Up Customers

Before you can add customer records to Accounts Receivable, you must set up account sets, billing cycles, distribution codes, receipt types, (payment) terms, and other records your company may require.

If you use optional fields, you must also set up optional fields for use with customers, customer groups, and national accounts.

For more information about any of these tasks, see:

General Steps for Setting Up Customers

To set up customer records in Accounts Receivable:

Decide on the account type (open item or balance forward) to assign to each customer record.
For more information, see About Customer Account Types.
Define customer groups to group customers for reporting purposes and for other reasons, such as by geographical areas.
You must set up at least one customer group before you can add customer records.
For more information, see About Customer Groups.
Create any national account records you require.
For example, you might use National Accounts if you deal with subsidiaries or branches of a company and you want to treat the company as one customer for billing, payment, and collection purposes, but ship orders to individual branches separately.
For more information, see About National Accounts.
Add customer records.
For more information, see About Accounts Receivable Customers.