Customer Maintenance
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FTD Mercury makes maintaining customers easy. If you use house accounts for your customers, after setting up these accounts, the customer billing process is automated (using the Accounts Receivable Billing module). FTD Mercury stores each customer transaction through Order Entry and Point of Sale. Each order, purchase, or payment made at your store may be applied to a customer’s house account. FTD Mercury also stores customer credit card information if your customers use credit cards for purchase.
Default customers such as your cash sales account, credit card accounts, and wire service accounts are also maintained in the customer screens of the program.
Maintaining your customer database in FTD Mercury also helps you with your store’s marketing strategies. If you consistently add customers to the program, you will soon have a complete listing of all your customers and their personal information.
Maintaining your customers is beneficial when preparing mailings; you may use the FTD Mercury marketing templates to merge your customer information into labels, letters, and envelopes. If you have the Mercury Marketing module, you can use your customer information to create direct mail and email marketing campaigns.
Each customer has a store of origin. The store of origin is the store where the customer was first added to the system. When Adding New Customers, you specify the customer’s store of origin. Then you can use FTD Mercury to print reports by store, view order history by store, and generate or print statements by store. FTD Mercury automatically assigns each of your customers a store of origin. If a customer has placed orders at more than one of your stores, then that customer’s store of origin is determined based on the store where that customer’s first sale occurred. If a customer does not have any sales, then that customer is associated with the first store that was created on the system.
How-to Procedures
Adding New Customers
Setting Up House Accounts
House accounts allow customers to run a monthly balance at your store, so they may charge products and services and receive statements. You can use the Mercury Administration to set defaults for house accounts to reduce employee input time and maintain a consistent billing pattern.
Steps for Setting up House Accounts
Viewing Customer Statistics
Customer statistics consist of sale and house account histories. Information such as a customer’s average sale, current balance, year-to-date sales and sales by occasion type are displayed (for sales processed in the Order Entry, Point of Sale, and Accounts Receivable modules). These statistics provide an overall glimpse of this customer’s buying patterns so you may gear your marketing to those patterns.
Steps for Viewing Customer Statistics
Maintaining Credit Card Information
Searching for Customers
If you want to view or change customer information, such as house account information, marketing permission, the customer’s address, the customer’s phone number, or standing orders associated with the customer, you must first perform a customer search.
Steps for Searching for Customers
Viewing a Customer's Order History
FTD Mercury allows you to access a customer’s history of orders, charges, and payments (in the Order Entry, Point of Sale, and Accounts Receivable modules).
Steps for Viewing a Customer's Order History
Adding Customer Contacts
At some point, you may want to add the names of additional people (contacts) that may charge to a customer’s house account. For example, you may want to add employee names if this customer is a business, or add family members’ names if this customer is an individual.
NOTE: Names that you type into the Ordered By field in Order Entry or Point of Sale are automatically added to this list.
Steps for Adding Customer Contacts
Window Descriptions
Customer Search Window
The Customer Search window allows you to locate customers in your customer database. You can search by several criteria, and FTD Mercury displays the matching customers based on the criteria. Once you have entered your search criteria, click Search to perform the search.
Customer Information Detail Window
The Customer Detail Information window is the central method of accessing customer information in FTD Mercury. The tasks you can perform from this window include:
- Adding New Customers
- Setting Up House Accounts
- Viewing Customer Statistics
- Maintaining Credit Card Information
- Searching for Customers
- Viewing a Customer’s Order History
The Customer Detail Information window consists of the following tabs, each of which contains important information about the customer account:
General Tab
The General tab of the Customer Detail Information window is used to add and update general customer information in your computer’s database. When adding a new customer, you must first complete this tab before setting up a house account.
House Account Tab
The House Account tab in the Customer Detail Information window allows you to set up a house account for customers and view house account information. Defaults for house accounts are configured in Mercury Administration.
Statistics Tab
The Statistics tab of the Customer Detail Information window includes valuable statistical information for the customer. These statistics provide an overall glimpse of this customer’s buying patterns so you may gear your marketing to those patterns. It also includes the house account standings for the customer. The statistics displayed are automatically generated by FTD Mercury and cannot be modified manually. You can find the following information on this tab:
- The average amount of each sale the customer made
- The total balance due on the customer’s house account
- The number of days late the customer is on their house account
- How many orders the customer placed last year, and the total value of the orders
- How many orders the customer has placed so far this year, and the total value of the orders
- The average dollar amount of sales, broken down by occasion
- Aging information for the customer’s balances
Credit Cards Tab
This tab displays the credit cards that this customer has used to pay for items in your shop. For each credit card, this tab displays:
- Name on card
- Type (credit card type)
- Account number (credit card number)
- Expiration date
When a customer uses a credit card for purchase, this information is automatically stored in this tab.
You may want to limit employee access to this window. To do so, you should modify employee access in Mercury Administration.
Contacts Tab
The Contacts tab in the Customer Detail Information window allows you to add names of other people with permission to charge to this account. For example, you may want to store employee or department names in this tab if the customer is a business, or family member names if the customer is an individual.
You can also remove recipients for a customer. When you remove a recipient, it no longer is displayed as an option in Order Entry or Point of Sale in the Customer list.
When you are finished making changes to this tab (after adding, editing, or removing customer contacts), click Save to save your changes.
Order History Tab
The Order History tab in the Customer Detail Information window displays previous orders that the customer has placed at your store. By default, orders from all stores display. You can filter a customer’s order history by store by selecting the store from the Store Name list.
This window also displays payment history. Dollar amounts in the Total column enclosed in parentheses indicate credits to an account (customer payments or credit memos), whereas dollar amounts not enclosed indicate debits to an account (orders or debit memos). If you double-click on an order, you can view detailed information about that order.
Marketing Tab
The Marketing tab of the Customer Detail Information window allows you to set up marketing information for each of your customers. Setting up this information will help you better market to your customers; for example, you can print reports and generate letters for specific types of customers (by account type, age group, birthday month, etc.).
If this window appears blank (there aren’t any categories or user questions listed), then you should first go into the Mercury Administration program to create your categories and questions. Both these options are set up in the Accounting folder in Mercury Administration. Marketing categories are set up in the Marketing screen, and user questions are set up in the Questions screen.
Statement Tab
that have been generated for the customer. From this window, you can:
- Click the View button to view detail for the highlighted statement.
- Click the Output Statement button to print/fax/e-mail the highlighted statement.
- Click Print Statement List to print all statements for the customer.
- Click New Statement to generate a new statement for the customer.
Standing Order Tab
The Standing Order Tab in the Customer Detail Information window allows you to perform the following tasks:
- View existing standing order templates associated with a customer
- Print a list of standing order templates associated with a customer
- Create a new standing order template
- Edit an existing standing order template
- Deleting an upcoming order based on a standing order template
- Remove all upcoming orders based on a standing order template
- Delete an existing standing order template
Customer Merge Window
Purge Customers Window
Customer Credit Card Window
The Customer Credit Card window opens when you click Add in the Credit Cards tab of the Customer Detail Information Window. It allows you to add a customer’s credit card information to FTD Mercury, allowing your customers to quickly and efficiently charge orders on this credit card for future orders.
Customer Credit Card Window Areas
