Has anyone done anything in system to facilitate a Customer SoldTo Parent / Child relationship? For reporting and for customer tracker it would be so useful to have something that does this. I have looked into National Account, but I don’t think that really fits the need.
We have some large corporations with separate billing addresses but they truly are the same parent customer. Reporting on our business with them as well as using a customer tracker to pull up all orders, quotes, jobs, rmas, etc would be fantastic.
We deal with restaurant chains where multiple locations (sometimes even hundreds of locations) are owned by different parent groups. We use National Accounts to keep track of it. While it doesn’t do what you describe by going to customer tracker to pull all orders, here are a few examples of how it benefits us:
Go to Customer Tracker of the Child and go to Financial>Billing>National Account and quickly see who the Parent is.
Quickly export a list of Child Cust IDs and use that list on any reports that have a Customer filter, such as Aged Receivables… we can Paste Insert the list of customers and run a single report that contains all records for the entire parent group.
We haven’t done much as far as customizing Epicor, but if you maintained it using National Account, there’s really no limit to what you could do with BAQs/Dashboards.
National Accounts is for when there are separate bill to addresses and you get one payment from a central payment processor and they also share the credit limit. For reports you can use Customer groups.
Thanks for your response.
We’ve already used customer groups for storing categorical type data such as end user, reseller, sales representative, etc… and then attach price lists for some of the customer groups.
Do you not recommend using National Accounts for holding SoldTo parent to child data? We don’t use most of the credit processing functionality currently (i.e., almost everything over certain $ gets reviewed for most customers) but I’m not sure if we tried to use it that we could get bitten by something unexpected.
You can use it for parent child relationships. We also use it the same way. We have some customers where bill to names and address are different. However, they all have the same central payment. So one cheque can have invoices for more than one customers. The National account setup works very well with that and shows all invoices together in the cash receipt entry. Other than cash receipt they work pretty much as stand alone customers in our case. For sales reports we use customer groups, since that we found it much simpler to use.
We have also not tried to use the credit pool sharing. You can choose not to use credit sharing.
One of our Analyst did a SPIKE and I think our conclusion in order to relate Dealers and OEMs and Direct Customers… Also was the use of National Accounts.
That does sound like a similar usage of it too. And I guess if you use it that way then probably not seeing a downside? I worry about an upgrade changing things up whenever we start using something in epicor that’s moving away from what appears intended, but this use of National Accounts really does look like it can fit the bill. Next up would be customizing the tracker. Maybe embedded dashboards in place of current orders / quotes / jobs tabs etc would work to make it easier.
I am in a similar situation with a bunch of customers set up that all have different bill to names and addresses, but the payments are grouped on a single check. Can you tell me how I can group these customer together as National accounts so I can just put in one invoice number noted on the payment and then see all of the open invoices on all of those accounts? Thank you in advance!
Sheri