I have been tasked with restructuring our existing customer data in Epicor (which is a mess).
Our setup (see image below for more clarity):
We manufacture product and sell to customers indirectly through OEM’s or dealers.
A dealer may be independent or part of a larger chain dealership.
Chain dealerships may bill at the store level or at the corporate level.
I think that I got this mostly figured out but am struggling with how to roll up information from the sub-dealers into the parent dealer. I think that this is where either Alternate Billing or National Accounts would come into play, but as a company we have not used either of these (or Alternate ship-to’s) to date (yes, we literally have an individual customers set up for every one of these right now in Epicor that are not linked together, many having duplicate ship-to’s setup .
Would anyone have any experience with using National Accounts (specifically tiered vs non-tiered) and when you would use these vs an alternate Bill-to?
I don’t think that the Alternate Bill-To would work for either of those dashed lines, as it replaced the bill-to on the SO (which doesn’t work when selling through an OEM).
What you choose really comes down to reporting and credit limit. What is your company’s end goal for both of them?
The thing you need to realize is that there are essentially 3 customer records on each transaction in the system. The Sold To, Bill To, and Ship To. They can all be the same or they can all be different. You also control what shows up on SO Ack, Pack Slips, and Invoices with flags and/or report customizations.
There is a lot to setting up complex Customer structures. As an example, at one company, we needed to track who the end product went to (even if it wasn’t shipped to them), who the distributor was that we sold the product to, and who to bill it to. I forget our exact solution, but there was a fair amount of work maintaining our customers and sales orders, but that is what management said was important.
I think that for all of the child dealerships, we would like to be able to see reporting at the parent level as well as the specific child.
On the credit side, in the past we have just assigned credit per customer account in Epicor. Moving forward, I think that for the Parent-Billing Sub-Dealers, the parent would have all of their credit. For the Self-Billing Sub-Dealers, it would carry it’s own credit.
So, thinking about it some more, here is more specifically what I am trying to solve for. I am trying to get billing, credit, and reporting to pull from the gray sub-dealer to the parent, while for the blue sub-dealer, I only need to pull reporting to the parent, as they are self-billing and have their own credit balance.
I am thinking that national accounts may work for these functions, but am not very familiar with them and would appreciate feedback on how to set up something like this.
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