Customer Categories are used for filtering and grouping report data related to Customers. Customer Categories are particularly useful for Sales Analysis reporting. How you define your categories is entirely up to you. Categories such as Retail, Wholesale, Trade, Distributer are typical examples.
Customer Category is not the only method of grouping similar customers, so you may want to consider other Customer ‘grouping’ fields such as Market Segments, Buying Groups, Reps and Customer Type before deciding on a Category list. Since it is mandatory that each customer is allocated to a Category, you may decide to set up a single Category to start with and change to a more structured set of customers by category at a later stage.
Example
Some examples of how you might use customer category
- Domestic, Intercompany, Overseas (client type can be used for this also)
- Retail, Wholesale, Trade, Distributer, Service Agent
- Key, Large, Medium, Small accounts
- Personal, Business, Government
Minimum Requirements
A Customer Category is mandatory for each Customer account created, so you must define at least 1 Customer Category when you begin setting up your data.
Changing Established Data
Customer categories can be added or renamed at any time after initial setup. You may change the category a customer is assigned to at any time, but be aware that any sales recorded (summarised) for the customer under the original category are not moved in retrospect to the new category – only sales going forward are summarised under the new category.
Panel Options
- Standard panel features
- Maintenance
- Views
- Audit – lists data changes made over time to the customer category currently being viewed
- Where used – lists the customers assigned to the category currently being viewed
- Sales this month – shows a summary of sales for the month for the category currently being viewed
- Reports
- List Customer Categories