Adding a Customer

Customers are master data in the Peachtree/Sage 50 sense: a record you set up once under Maintain, then select from a dropdown everywhere it's needed — quotes, sales orders, delivery notes, invoices — instead of retyping a name and address on every document.

What's on the record

Beyond the name, the fields that matter most are contact details (used on printed documents and reminders) and billing information. If the customer is in a different currency than your company's default, that shows up as a small currency tag next to their name on documents — worth checking once at creation time rather than discovering it mid-invoice.

A new customer starts with a clean slate: no open balance, no history. Everything you see on their detail page afterward — outstanding invoices, total billed, payment history — is built entirely from the documents you create against them going forward.

Tips

• Search for the customer's name before creating a new one — duplicate customer records are the most common source of a fragmented, hard-to-reconcile receivables list later on.
• You don't need every field filled in to save; only the name is required. Add billing/VAT details when you have them, before the first invoice goes out.
• Once a customer has real documents against them, most master-data fields stay editable — updating a phone number or address doesn't retroactively change past invoices.