Customers, suppliers and contacts

Customers, suppliers and contacts, in brief

A contact in Skyline Nexus ERP is a single record that can be a customer, a supplier, or both, carrying pay terms, a credit limit, an opening balance and the address and tax detail an invoice needs. It matters because sales and purchases are only as reliable as the contact behind them: a supplier with no pay term set, or a customer with no credit limit, is a business relying on memory instead of the system to know when money is due.

This guide covers adding a contact, contact type, customer groups, credit limits and pay terms, opening balances, and reading a contact's ledger and statement. It does not repeat how to record a sale or how to record a purchase, which cover the transactions themselves once the contact already exists.

Contact type: customer, supplier, or both

Adding a contact starts with Contact type: Supplier, Customer, or Both Supplier and Customer, and a separate Individual or Business toggle that decides which fields become required. A Business contact requires a Business Name and, depending on the market, a Tax No. and a Commercial Registration (CR No.); an Individual contact only needs a name.

Both Supplier and Customer is worth using deliberately rather than by accident: a landlord who is also a customer, or a supplier the business occasionally sells to, only needs one contact record either way, and that single record is what lets its ledger show purchases and sales together rather than as two unconnected relationships.

Before you start

A few decisions up front make the difference between a contact list that is useful for credit control and one that is just a name and a phone number, and every one of them is far cheaper to get right before the first invoice than to retrofit once dozens of contacts already exist without them.

• Decide the business's own pay term policy (for example 30 days) before the first supplier or customer is entered, so it can be applied consistently
• Set up any Customer Groups needed for different pricing before adding customers into them
• Know each contact's real opening balance and its date, since it is entered once at set-up
• Agree who is allowed to change a customer's credit limit, since it is a control, not just a field
• Have each supplier's tax number and, where relevant, CR No. to hand for a compliant purchase invoice

Adding a contact

Go to Contacts, Add Customer or Add Supplier (or Add Contact with Both selected). Beyond the contact type and name fields, the form covers Mobile (required), Email, Alternate Contact Number, Landline, Date of Birth, and for a Business contact, Tax No. and CR No. An address block, with city, state, country and postal code, feeds directly onto invoices and statements, and up to ten custom fields are available for anything specific to the business.

Contact ID can be left blank to auto-generate one, or set manually where a business already has its own numbering scheme it wants to keep using, such as matching a legacy supplier code. Checking the contact list for an existing record before adding a new one is worth the extra few seconds: a supplier or customer entered twice under a slightly different spelling splits its history across two records, and merging that back together later is far more work than searching first.

Customer groups: pricing, not credit control

Contacts, Customer Groups sets up a Customer Group Name with a Price calculation type of either a flat Calculation Percentage or a linked Selling Price Group. Assigning a customer to a group changes what they are charged, either by a percentage adjustment or by switching them onto a different price list entirely; it is a pricing tool, not a place to set credit limits or payment terms.

That distinction matters because it is easy to assume a wholesale customer group also implies looser credit terms. In Skyline Nexus ERP the two are separate: pay term and credit limit are set on the individual contact, so a wholesale price applies to the group while credit control still has to be decided contact by contact.

Pay terms and credit limits

Pay Term is a number paired with a period of Days or Months, and it is what a sale or purchase's own Pay Term field defaults from once the contact is chosen; it is what a business means when it tells a supplier or customer terms are 30 days rather than cash on delivery. Credit Limit is a separate field with its own help text, keep blank for no limit, and once set it is checked against a customer's running total due, so a limit that has been reached is a signal the account needs a decision before more credit is extended.

Neither field enforces itself retroactively: setting a credit limit today does not reopen or flag sales already recorded before it existed, and a pay term change only affects documents entered after the change. Both are best set at the point a contact is created, based on an actual credit decision, rather than left at their defaults and revisited only when a balance is already a problem.

The same two fields exist on a supplier contact for a different reason: a supplier's Pay Term is what the business has agreed to pay by, not a limit the business is granting, and setting it correctly is what lets the accounts payable ageing report show which bills are genuinely overdue rather than simply unpaid.

Opening balances

A contact's Opening Balance is entered on the Add Contact form (or through Import Contacts for a batch of them) and represents what that customer or supplier already owed, or was owed, on the day the business started using Skyline Nexus ERP. It drives that contact's ageing and dues from day one, so a customer who genuinely owed money before go-live shows the correct balance and ageing bucket immediately, rather than starting from zero.

Opening balances at the contact level are a document on the contact, not a Fiscal Authority journal; the matching general ledger opening balance for Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable as a whole is entered separately, on the Fiscal Authority Opening Balances screen, against the control account itself. The two need to agree in total, which is exactly what makes reconciling contact opening balances to the control account worth doing once, carefully, at migration rather than assuming they will simply match. Our guide on migrating to Skyline Nexus ERP covers that reconciliation step in more detail for a business bringing in its full contact list at once.

Worked example: a new customer with terms and a limit

A Canadian distributor adds a new wholesale customer, Maple Retail Co., as a Business contact with Tax No. and address filled in, assigned to the Wholesale customer group for its 10 percent price adjustment, Pay Term 30 days, and a Credit Limit of CAD 15,000. Two months later, Maple Retail Co. has CAD 14,200 outstanding across several invoices and places a new order for CAD 2,000.

Because the new order would take the running balance to CAD 16,200, above the CAD 15,000 limit, Skyline Nexus ERP checks the total due against the stored credit limit and treats the difference as exceeded, giving the business a clear signal to decide whether to collect part of the balance first, temporarily raise the limit, or ask for payment on this order specifically, rather than finding out the account was over its limit only when a statement is next reviewed.

Reading a contact's ledger and statement

Every contact carries its own profile view showing Total Purchase, Total Purchase Paid and Total Purchase Due for a supplier, Total Sale, Total Sale Paid and Total Sale Due for a customer, an Opening Balance and Opening Balance Due where one was set, and an Advance Balance for any credit sitting on the account from an overpayment. Beyond the profile, the Customer Financial Centre and Supplier Financial Centre carry the full Customer Ledger or Supplier Ledger, a Statement of Account, an Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable Report, and an Aging Report per contact.

These are the screens to hand a customer who disputes a balance, or to check before chasing a supplier for a credit note: the ledger shows every document and payment in order, the statement is the version formatted to send out, and the aging report shows how long each unpaid amount has been outstanding. Pulling the statement before a difficult call, rather than during it, is what turns a dispute into a five-minute conversation instead of a drawn-out one.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

Most contact problems are really credit-control or data-quality problems wearing a different name, and nearly all of them are visible on a contact's own ledger the moment someone thinks to look.

• No pay term set on a supplier or customer, so every document defaults to whatever the last person entering it happened to choose
• A credit limit left blank by default rather than by decision, so no customer is ever actually stopped from over-extending
• Confusing a Customer Group's pricing effect with a credit or payment concession, when the group only changes price
• A contact created twice under slightly different names because Contact ID or an existing search was not checked first, splitting one relationship's history across two records
• An opening balance entered on the contact but never reconciled to the Fiscal Authority Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable opening balance, leaving the two out of step from day one
• Business contacts saved without a Tax No. or CR No., which surfaces later as a compliance gap on an invoice rather than being caught at set-up

Related reports

A contact's health is visible well before a balance becomes a problem, provided the right report is checked regularly.

• Customer Financial Centre: Customer Ledger, Statement of Account, Accounts Receivable Report, Customer Aging Report
• Supplier Financial Centre: Supplier Ledger, Accounts Payable Report, Supplier Aging Report
• Fiscal Authority, Reports, AR Aging Report and AP Aging Report, for the general ledger's own view across all contacts
• Reports, Supplier and Customer Report, for a combined operational view
• Import Contacts, for reviewing pay term, credit limit and opening balance in bulk before a migration