Since tracking customers is such a vital part of business, and using the
point of sale is such an easy way of obtaining that information and retaining
that information, we wanted to take an in-depth look. And that's why I've
brought, Ashley, our technical services director over at POS Nation, back to
discuss with us those specific items. So Ashley, let's jump right into customer
maintenance. How do we create a customer? Well, the easiest way is, when you're first
coming into the entry screen, the cashier screen, and you're going to be ringing
people out. If you are tracking customers, the first thing you would naturally do
is see if the customer is already in the system. And we can do that down here
in the right-hand corner of the screen where the customer info box is. Now
normally, we're just going to be clicking the find button and that will bring up a
list of your existing customer base. Now, we can search for existing customers
using customer number, last name, a few key pieces of information. But many times
you're going to have the new customer that you can be adding right here on the
spot. And right here, there's the add customer button and we can just click on
that. And the critical piece of information you really need
to capture right up front is the customer number, first name, and last name.
And normally that customer number will either be something you manually
use to input. It could be a telephone number,
it could be a serialized bar code, a customer card that you distribute every
time. And then we're going to add in the customer's name. We'll just call this
fellow John. And we'll put in a last name here, Smith.
And that's really all that's essential to initially create this customer in the
system. We're going to click Save, and now if we go back in, it's going to
automatically put this customer down as the customer for the existing invoice. If
we go back to find, we could go back through and search again. And I'm just
going to add one more customer for future reference here. And we'll use the
keyboard this time, just to show you that there's a couple of ways to do this. I'm
gonna call this customer Jane. Alright and then we're going to click Save again.
Now if we go back to fine we'll see that we have the two customers there. And if
we want to search, we can search by the last name here. As soon as you start
typing letters, the system's already searching and isolating the customers
for selection. Well, you can see that's very easy, so the other thing that we
we've been discussing is the ability to have like on-house accounts and layaway
so what I'd really like for you to show everybody is how to distinguish those
and how to actually move forward with specific transactions. Sure, so initially,
if you have a customer in the system or you're gonna, right here, enter a new
customer, the nice thing is that we don't have to go to the back office if we have
the right security privileges set up to make changes to that customer's account.
So let's say that we're gonna give John Smith a house account with a $500 credit
limit. Whenever we locate his record, we can actually do an edit function on that
customer to call up the customer record. And this brings back up the main screen
we created him with, and at that point, we can go to the account info tab. And you
have a few selections here, we're going to make sure that we're selected the
standard account type, and we're going to make sure that we click open account
date that establishes the date that the account was created. And we're gonna set
our $500 maximum credit limit right here, and that's done at this point.
We're just going to be careful that you make sure that you do click the Update
button when you're done with that so that the customer actually does have a
house account limit. At that point, it's very easy for us to go ahead and ring up
an item and attach it to that customer account. When we go to
to add a few items here to the invoice, when we go to the pay function,
this is one of the key features is that you won't notice this on account payment
button until you have created at least one in-house customer account in the
system. Once you have and they have a value of a credit limit
that's not expired or over its limit at that point, this button will appear.
And once we make sure that we have selected that customer for the account,
it'll just put that right on the customer account. We don't have to
necessarily print a receipt, and there it is. Okay well let's look at that
particular person's history and let's see what what it looks like to have an
account balance. Sure, well we can do it from the front screen here. Quite often
when you're managing accounts receivable and that sort of thing you're going to
go from the back office here. And if we do want to access customer maintenance
from the back screen, we're going to go to the options button and administrative
tab and then letter e. Here it's customer maintenance and that's going to bring up
our list of customers. Here again we can use some of the same functionality here
to sort through our customers and locate a particular one that we want to
work on. We can select that customer at this point and go back to the account
info tab. At that point, to really see the records in the history purchase, hit the
purchase history, we're gonna select the detailed account info button right here
and this is going to show a list of the activity for this particular customer.
It's going to show, if there were more than one transaction, there would just be
line item after line item here. And we can sort with several buttons here. We
have all invoices, we can sort by only open invoices, or only paid invoices. And
so I'm gonna look at open invoices. Right now this is their outstanding credit
information. We have a few things that we can do down here, we can create a
statement, if you click on that it's gonna ask you first starting and ending
ending date for your transaction period, and that'll allow you to send out a bill
to your customer and and bill them and receive payment back. If we don't want to
do that, if it's a walk-in basis where they're just going to come in and pay
and you're gonna let them flow within that credit limit, then let's say the
customer walks in right now for a payment, then we can just
log those payments right here. So we have a few options down at the bottom of the
screen, the Selective transaction type, this is going to be either a store
credit or a standard payment, so you actually could add a credit back onto
that customer's account. If for some reason there was an issue where you
needed to do that normally we will use standard payment and we can apply that
directly to invoices or we're just going to leave it to oldest. If we're just
going to default to obtain whatever is due at the current moment, we are
going to select the payment type. If we want to record that here, we got paid by
cash, check, or credit, I'm gonna do cash for simplicity and I'm gonna go in here
and enter a $20 payment. All right and then we got to be sure that we click the
apply payment and it will ask us if we want to print a receipt on that. At this
point, it is going to update the balance due to $33 it was $53
and here again we can continue creating billing statements if we'd like or we
can receive payments right there on the fly. Wow that's great. Well you know one
of the things that I'd also like to mention is the fact that the layaway is
an option, and we saw right there, that you can actually create two different
styles of accounts, so dive into that and show us kind of the breadth and the
depth of what layaway will do. Sure, when you're ready to set up layaway you do
have to choose in the system between house accounts and layaways. You can't
do both at the same time. So when we're gonna make a transition here, we are
going to have to go into the management and the setup screen here, and we're
going to go to setup screen, and we're going to go to the account control,
which is actually the default screen here, and we're going to enable layaway
features. Now, when we do that, they're these two columns right here, do
give us several options on the functionality for layaways. One of the
big ones here, one of the most necessary I'll point out, is the deposit
type. Most people do want to have some sort of layaway deposit. We can do that
by flat dollar amount or more commonly when we set those up ,we might set up
some sort of a percentage, let's say 10% for our example here, that we're going to
do every time a layaway occurs. The other thing that we would look at, a few
of these security features in safety features for the merchant. Do we want to
allow the customer to pick up a partially paid order, we could check that
button if we want most people want to know that they've got payment in full
and the customer's walking out the door with the layaway.
So another key feature is the force minimum deposit. That just allows us to
determine if we're going to allow anybody to walk out of
the store with merchandise without paying that minimum. Once we set those up,
then we're just going to click update.
All right, once we log out we're just going to log back in real quick to let
the settings take effect. Now, we do have to do another thing to the customer here.
We're gonna select the customer that we want to actually allow a layaway account
to happen under and we wonder if we go to that customer, we're going to select
the account info tab, and this time instead of a standard house account we
are going to select the layaway account. And we are going to have to select the
opening account date, now, in this case since we're not doing a house account, we
don't have to worry about assigning a max balance. We will update that account.
Now, at this point, we will see that you have two payment style buttons. Now we
have the standard pay button and the rest of the pay button has been
segregated to a new button called layaway. Now, at this point, if we start to
ring up a few items and we go to layaway payment style, it's going to immediately
bring up, here's our initial grand total is $58.84, it is prompting us for a 10%
payment. I'm going to go ahead and accept that and we're gonna take a cash payment
for that. That will be logged in the system, and that's how you do layaway.
Okay great, well let's see the account now because you did pick Jane,
and let's look at her account and see how it's changed. All right we're gonna
go back in and select that customer. We are going to need to go to edit, not just
select. Select will put the customer in the customer box, but if we go to edit
that actually brings up the customer window again. So we're going to go to the
account tab and now you see that there's really nothing happening
here on the account page because this isn't a house account, it's tracked
differently by the system. And there's really no billing cycle to it, there are
a few reports we can access on the backside in the reporting section, but
primarily, what we would need to know when that customer came back in is how
to make another payment on their existing account. Well, I think that's a
great differentiation, so you can see how standard house accounts and how layaway
accounts actually work.