Understand Customers for Contract Management

Customers are the people or companies that buy your products, including distributors and resellers. Each customer can have one or more contracts, and those contracts carry the transactions, revenue, invoices, and payments tied to that relationship. Keeping customer information accurate matters for financial reporting and for how well Maxio syncs with your connected GL and CRM.

How customer records fit into your books

A customer is the outermost container in Maxio's revenue model: each customer holds one or more contracts, and each contract holds the transactions, invoices, and revenue tied to that agreement. See Understand Contracts for how contracts and customers relate.

Customer records also connect to systems outside Maxio:

• A connected general ledger syncs a customer's billing address, and flags any customer that hasn't synced yet in the Customers Attention Needed box. See Monitor Customer Alerts and Errors.
• A connected CRM, such as Salesforce, can create customer records automatically when you process sales orders.
• A customer's e-Bill billing profile controls whether their invoices are emailed and paid automatically. See Manage a Customer's e-Bill Billing Profile.

What a customer record includes

A customer record carries identifiers, addresses, e-Bill and autopay settings, analytics fields, and integration-specific fields for QuickBooks, Salesforce, and AvaTax. See the Customer Fields Reference for what every field does.

Related information

For adding, editing, and deleting customer records day to day, see Manage Customers for Contract Workflows. When the same customer exists twice, combine the records rather than deleting one; see Merging Customers.