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1987-05-23
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SOAR USERS GUIDE
SECTION 5
BUILDING A CUSTOMER FILE
Now that you have setup your system file, SOAR knows where to
store and fetch the data for the other required files. At this
point it is best to add five or ten customers so you can get on
with exploring the capabilities of SOAR.
From the Main Menu select 4, Customer Maintenance. SOAR will
load the customer maintenance program and display the Customer
Maintenance Menu. You can see that you have five choices (not
counting the EXIT choice) and these are fully described in the
manual. At this time we want to add customers so select option
number 1. A screen will be seen similar to the one below.
ADD NEW CUSTOMER
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
X 1. Customer ID: X
X 2. Name: X
X 3. Address: X
X 4. Address: X
X 5. City: X
X 6. State: 7. ZIP: X
X 8. Telephone: X
X 9. Tax Exempt: X
X 10. Current Charges: X
X 11. Current Balance: X
X 12. Past Due Balance: X
X 13. Year to Date: X
X 14. Last Payment Date: X
X 15. Last Check Number: X
X 16. Last Check Amount: X
X 17. Monthly Finance Charge: X
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ESC to EXIT
Start entering your customers and filling in the data described
in the following sections. You will be prompted for every
entry and given an opportunity of making changes before the
data is saved.
5.1 Customer ID:
The highlighted area is the prompt SOAR is giving you to
indicate how many characters can be entered as the customer
identifier. You may use any combination of up to 12 letters or
numbers as the ID. If you already have a system that uses
numbers to identify customers, then continue to use these
numbers. If you are starting fresh, you might want to use the
customer name as the ID. For example, SMITH, JONES, AJAX, are
all valid identifiers. If you have more than one customer with
the same name then you can add a suffix to further identify
them; e.g., SMITH1, SMITH2, and so on. Complete your entry by
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SOAR USERS GUIDE
depressing the ENTER key and SOAR will advance to the next
field to be entered. Note: you may exit this program at any
time by depressing the ESC key. This is true for all programs
in SOAR. Since SOAR is hierarchical, the ESC key can be used
to climb up from any level to the Main Menu and to the
operating system.
5.2 Customer Address:
Enter the customer address as you want bills mailed. If you do
not need two lines for the address then just depress the ENTER
key when the second address prompt appears.
Enter the customer city, state and 5-digit ZIP code when
prompted. The state need only be entered as the two letter
abbreviation approved by the U.S. Postal Service.
You may enter the customer's telephone number for reference
purposes; it will be printed as part of your customer master
list.
5.3 Customer Tax Status:
Line 9 requires you to enter whether or not the customer will
have sales tax applied to taxable purchases. Enter a "Y" if
the customer is to be exempt from taxes (doesn't pay any) and a
"N" if the customer is to pay sales tax. If you happen to live
in a state that does not have sales tax then enter a "N" since
you have already entered a 0.00 as the sales tax rate in the
system file.
5.4 Customer Current Financial Status:
Lines 10 through 13 allow you to enter the present status of
the customer for billing purposes. You may change this data at
a later time if it is not available now. If you do not wish to
enter values now, simply depress ENTER at each prompt.
There may be some confusion concerning Current Charges, Current
Balance and Past Due Balance. Current Charges are those
charges incurred since the current billing period began; i.e.,
since the last End of Billing Period program was run. Every
time a charge transaction is entered and posted, this field is
updated. Thus, you have instant access to the current charges
for any customer.
Current Balance is the balance remaining from the previous
billing period that is not yet past due. For instance, if
customer SMITH had $100 in charges last billing period for
which he was billed, then after End of Billing Period pro-
cessing his Current Balance would be $100 and his Current
Charges would be zero. When End of Billing Period processing
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SOAR USERS GUIDE
is run the "old" Present Balance is added to the Past Due
Balance, the Current Balance is replaced by the Current Charges
and the Current Charges are set to zero.
SOAR uses the principal that anything billed today is due
before the next billing period. If you bill on a monthly basis
then you expect payment before you bill again. Therefore, Past
Due Balance is that which has not been paid since the last
billing period. Using SMITH for an example again, assume that
SMITH had $100 in charges in January and that you billed him on
February 1st. When the End of Billing Period processing was
run after your billing, his Current Charges were set to zero
and his Present Balance was set to $100. SMITH did not make
any payments in February. Now, after billing on March 1st and
running End of Billing Period processing the $100 was trans-
ferred to Past Due Balance.
Now is as good a time as any to discuss how payments are
handled. Whenever a payment transaction is entered and posted,
the amount of the payment is first applied against the Past Due
Balance. Any remainder is applied against the Present Balance.
Should a customer make a payment greater than their balance,
then their Present Balance would be a negative number to in-
dicate that they have a credit.
5.5 Customer Last Payment Data:
Lines 14-16 provide data to show the last payment data for a
customer. These fields are updated whenever a payment trans-
action is posted. If you do not have this data availabe now,
just depress ENTER when prompted.
5.6 Customer Monthly Finance Charge:
SOAR allows each customer to have an individual late charge
percentage. Thus, your very good customers that you wish to
give special treatment can have a monthly finance charge of
zero. This value must be entered as a