Answer: Customer record in Solid Route Accounting™ business systems track every invoice, item return, and payment of every customer a business deals with. There does come a time however when it may be necessary to remove a customer record due to inactivity or other reasons. Before a customer record can be deleted though, there are two things that must first be considered.
- The first thing to consider is that all transactions, including orders and payments, must be fully resolved before a customer record can be deleted. This means that both the customer's Balance and their Order balance must be at $0.00 to be able to delete the record. If there are any outstanding balances in these areas, then Orders should be considered and cancelled if need be, and all outstanding invoices be reconciled and paid in full through Received On Account (ROA) Transactions. Once all outstanding balances are zeroed out, the customer record is ready to be deleted.
- The second consideration is the customer type being deleted. In Solid Route Accounting™ business systems, there are three basic customer types and one special customer type. The three basic customer types are Independent, Branch Office, and Head Office. Independent and Branch Office customers can be deleted at will without any further consideration. If a Head Office record needs to be deleted, ensure that all its Branch Offices are assigned to another Head Office or made into Independent customers, to ensure that their billing won’t continue to go to the Head Office address/record that is going to be deleted.
- The special customer type, which is a licensed feature, is a MultiVendor customer. A MultiVendor is a special customer record that represents an existing supplier in the business system. Charges to customers assigned to a MultiVendor are first paid to the supplier, and then the supplier compensates the Solid Route Accounting™ business once they've received the customer payments. If MultiVendors are being used, then before deleting a MultiVendor customer record, ensure that no Head Offices or Independent customers are assigned to the MultiVendor record prior to deletion. Neglecting to do this could cause billing to continue to be sent to the deleted MultiVendor's address.
Enterprise Edition Users:
For information on creating and posting Received On Account transactions, please view Article #75: How to Post a Received On Account (ROA) Payment. If the customer record has Orders that need to be cancelled, in Solid Business Central navigate to the Sales screen and select the customer that needs to be deleted. Use [F2 - Open Bills] to display a list of all active Orders for this customer record. Select an order with the [ENTER] key, set the date to today's date if necessary, and set the 'Type' to C – Cancelled. Save this transaction with [CTRL+END] to cancel this order.
Once all ROA payments are posted and orders cancelled, verify that the customer record being deleted does not have any other customer records dependent upon it, such as if it's a Head Office or MultiVendor customer record. If it does, then either re-assign those dependent records to a different Head Office or MultiVendor first, or make them otherwise independent of the record being deleted, before proceeding with the deletion. Once these two items have been addressed, the customer record is now ready for deletion.
To delete a customer record in Solid Business Central™, navigate to [Datafile / Customer / View], and view the customer record that needs to be deleted. When displayed, simply use the [Delete] key on the keyboard to display the deletion prompt:
- If the customer record has no invoices created for them, the prompt will be 'Cancel customer? (y/N)'. Use the Y key for Yes to continue with deletion.
- If the customer record has had invoices created for them in the past, the prompt will be 'Bills found in system … cancel anyway? (y/N)'. Use the Y key for Yes to continue with deletion.
The customer record will now be removed from the active customer records.