Customer Account Overview

Customer accounts allow your regular customers to log on to the store with a username and password. This provides the following benefits:

· You can pre-set your customers' address information so that they do not have to retype it when they checkout.

· You can set spend limits for specific accounts.

The following benefits are only available in Actinic Business and Actinic Designer:

· You can give a discount, such as a trade discount, to different groups of customers. These new prices are accessible after people log in.

· You can show/hide products from different customer groups in order to create a personalised store.

This section describes how to create a customer account.

Note: Details on creating customer groups and assigning discounts to them are in Customer Groups. Customer Groups are not available in Actinic Catalog.

Go to 'Operations| Customer Accounts' or press the button on the toolbar.

The main list on the left lists all your customer accounts. Highlight the one you want to edit and click 'Edit Customer'. You can also use the 'Search' field to find the customer you want. Click 'Find' to go to the first customer, and click 'Next' to go to the next matching one.

Click 'Remove Customer' to delete a customer from the list. You will then need to go to 'Housekeeping | Purge | Purge Customer Accounts' to permanently delete them.

Click 'New Customer' to create a new customer. There are three tabs in this area:

· Account - described in Entering Main Account Details.

· Addresses - described in Adding Addresses To Your Customer Accounts.

· Buyers - described in Adding Buyers To Your Customer Accounts.

Note: It is possible to import customer accounts via a 'Hierarchical Import'. Hierarchical importing, and the correct fields required for importing customer accounts, are described in What Is A Hierarchical File?.

Using Existing Order Information

The quickest way to create a customer account is to click the 'Create Customer Account' button in the 'Customer' tab of an order. This will populate all the different areas of the customer account with one button click (apart from the login and password for the buyer). See The 'Customer' Tab - Checking Contact Details for more details on orders.

Also, you can click the 'Copy Details from Order Contact' button at various points in the customer account creation to copy contact/address details from an order you have received.

In the left hand list you will see all the invoice and delivery contacts for all the orders you've received. When you select one, the details appear in the window at the right. Click 'OK' to use this information.

Note: You may see two entries for each contact. One is the invoice contact. The other is the delivery contact.

There may also be three other options:

Field	Meaning
Create New Address Record	Leave this box selected if you want to create a new address in the 'Addresses' tab from these order details.
Valid Invoice Address	Select this box in order for the order to be marked as a valid invoice address. You can change this within the 'Addresses' tab.
Valid Delivery Address	Select this box in order for the order to be marked as a valid delivery address. You can change this within the 'Addresses' tab.

Click 'OK' to bring the name and address details into this area.