Customers and Sales Orders

Customers represent the companies that purchase your goods and services. They are referenced on sales quotations, sales orders, invoices, and in accounts receivable.

Customers are created in the AR module and all financial related data, such as credit limits and accounts, are defined by designated users with access to financial functions. Customers reference business relations for all address details and default tax data. See QAD Financials User Guide for details.

After a customer has been created and set up by an authorized role, additional operational data, such as the default inventory site for sales transactions, can be associated with the record in Customer Data Maintenance (2.1.1).

Values associated with customer addresses determine default values in functions that reference customers, as well as determining how customer transactions are processed. For example, Credit Hold determines whether orders for a customer are automatically put on credit hold.

A sales order or sales quotation can reference up to three customer addresses. These addresses can reference the same business relation or different business relations.

• Bill-to customer. The customer paying the invoice. A single bill-to is assigned when the customer is set up. If no bill-to is assigned, the sold-to customer code is used as the bill-to.

• Ship-to customer. The customer receiving the order. Each customer can have multiple ship-to addresses. You can create a new ship-to during the process of creating a sales order. However, this is only possible if your role has permission to execute the Customer Ship-To Create (27.20.2.1) function.

Sales order header information, such as default credit terms and currency, is determined by the bill-to customer. Other fields default from the sold-to customer, unless a customer record was entered for the ship-to address for the order. These include language, taxable status, and other tax defaults.

During order entry, the bill-to address defaults from the sold-to, unless a different bill-to address is assigned to the sold-to customer. The ship-to address also defaults from the sold-to address. If alternate ship-to addresses are defined, they can be selected as needed.

Only active customers that have operational data defined can be selected for a sales order. In addition, whether you can create a new order for a customer can be affected by the customer blocking functions. These functions let you prevent specified transactions from being created for active customers. This can be used while your are renegotiating a customer contract to prevent new orders or to block shipments to a customer with credit problems. Customer blocking is defined using functions on the Blocked Transactions Menu (2.23). See QAD Master Data User Guide for details.