21. Daily Usage - Managing Customers

Your customer list can be found on the right side of your main screen by clicking on the Customers tab. This list will show all customers sorted either by last name or first name, depending on the preference selected in the General Options of the Manager Window. While Checkout does not require Customers to be assigned to Invoices, to save Orders or Quotes, you are going to need to have customers to add to them.

21.1 Adding a New Customer

To add a new customer to your store, select New Customer at the bottom of the Customer List. This will open the Customer Inspector. Here, you will enter some general information such as the customers name, address and company. When you are satisfied with the information in this window, click the Close and they will appear in your customer list. If you have a customer list to import, please refer to 21.5 below. You can also enter multiple ship to addresses and set a tax region for each of the customers addresses.

21.2 Editing an Existing Customer

To edit an existing customer, click on the pencil to the right of their name in the customer list. This will again open the Customer Inspector. The Address, Contact Information and Extra Info fields can all be collapsed or expanded by clicking on the arrow to the left of the field header. At the top, you can edit the customer name, the company he or she works for and the tax identification number, should you require it. Remember that you can turn on the option to automatically capitalize customer names by going to the Manager Window and selecting the General option and then clicking on the check-box option to automatically capitalize customer names. You can edit their current address in the second section. Their phone and fax number, as well as their email address can be edited in the third section. In the fourth section is Extra Info. That field is hidden by default because it may contain private information that you may not want your customers to see. This field shows the total number and amount of orders and invoices, and how much, if any is left unpaid on invoices. It also provides employees with a Comments field to add notes about the customer for other employees to view. These notes are able to be searched via the live spotlight search on the main screen.

21.3 Customer Export and Report

Checkout makes it easy to keep contacts up-to-date within your Apple Address Book. You can send all of your customers to your Address Book by going to File menu, and selecting Export Customers (manager login required). You can export your customers to a vCard to be imported into Address Book or select an Excel, Numbers, CSV or TSV format. You can also get an overview of your customers from the report menu. Go to the Manager Window and choose the Reports option. From there, choose the Customers option. This report will show you a breakdown of all of your customers, the total number of invoices, the total amount of sales and the total margin on those sales, all broken down by customer.

21.4 Deleting an Existing Customer

To delete an existing customer from your customer list, click on their name to highlight them, and then press the delete key on your keyboard. Please note that only one customer can be deleted at a time. You will be prompted to verify that you wish to delete that customer. You cannot undo a deletion, so be sure that you are deleting the contact that you wish to delete. When you click the Delete button, that customer will be removed from your list. Please note that a customer with open orders cannot be deleted. You will first need to delete the open orders to proceed with the deletion of the customer. All invoices for the deleted customer will not be modified.

21.5 Importing Customers

If you have a large customer list, and would like to import them in bulk, you can do so in any one of several formats. If you export your contacts from another application, the file can be saved and imported in CSV (comma separated), TSV (tab delimited) or VCF (vCard) formats. If your contacts are all in Apple Address Book, you can import them to Checkout by selecting all the customers you wish to bring over from Address Book and then dragging them to your desktop. This will create a VCard file on your desktop. From within Checkout, go to the File menu and choose the option to Import Customers (manager login required). You will be prompted to select the VCard file that is on your desktop. The system will automatically match the import fields to within the fields in Checkout. Choose the Import button at the bottom-right corner and a progress bar will show you the status of the import. When the import is complete, a pop-up message will tell you how many records were successfully imported. Click the Close Importer option and verify that the customers were imported by going to your Customer List. The process for importing using a CSV or TSV format is similar, except that you have to match import fields manually, after selecting the file you wish to import from. To do so, select the CSV or TSV file which you are using to import customers from, and then use the drop-down lists to match the required fields. When all fields are matched, click the Import button. Again, a progress bar will show the status of the import, and when the import is complete, a pop-up message will tell you how many records were successfully imported. Close the importer and verify that the import worked by viewing your customer list. Please note that the system will import and seek duplicates by customer first and last name. In some instances, it will use a unique ID (for instance, when importing from Apple Address Book) to seek out duplicates. Depending on the option you have selected at the top of the import window, duplicates will either be updated, rejected or created with a suffix. At the end of the import process, the pop-up message will inform you if any records were rejected for being duplicates. If the reject option is not selected, it will just inform you of how many records were imported and will not mention if customer records were updated or not.