Cash Customer versus Account Customer
This article will give a brief description of the difference between your "cash" customers and your "account" customers along with walking you through on how to set up either.
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Do you have customers that pay “on account” and customers that pay at the time of the rental? These types of customers can be known as account and cash customers. The true difference within Essentials for these two types of customers is when they pay their rental transaction.
For you to be able to differentiate your “account” customers from your “cash” customers within Rental Essentials, you have the ability to add credit limits. When you add credit limits, every time a payment is collected, the credit limit will show on the payment screen as well as on the customer record.
To add a credit limit to your account customer, from the Customer list, search for the customer and click the edit icon next to the customer's name. Once the customer's record has been brought up, click on Advanced Mode to get to the additional customer fields. Towards the bottom center of the customer's record, you will find the Account Information. From here, you will enter the customer's credit limit.
Tag Manager
Optional - In Configuration > Tag Manager, add a tag called ‘Account’ or whatever you call your monthly billed customers. This is useful in People > Customers if you want to only show your Account customers or contracts. Although you can add one called ‘Cash’ if you wish, it can be time-consuming to add that tag to every new cash customer, so it may be best to just tag the account customers, and know that all others are cash. You can now go to your Account customers and add that tag. If you wish, you can now create a customer filter to only show customers with Account.
Allow outstanding balances on account
Go to Configuration > Company Configuration > Tax and Payment Options to make sure the Allow Outstanding Balance option is not checked. Of course, if you don't mind your customers going over their account limits, just make sure this option is checked.
If the Account Information section isn't completed, your customer will default to a "cash" customer. If the customer is required to pay all in full at the time of rental or required to pay in cash only, be sure to add this message to the Comments section of the customer record found under the Administrative Information section in the Advanced Mode of editing the customer record.
You can also set required percentages for your "cash" customers. This will force them to pay this amount of the rental at the time of reservation and/or send out. This way, you're guaranteed the customer will pay.
Have comments you want to add to your customer's file? Just enter the message in the comments field. If you want the message to stand out more, just add the word "Warning" in any part of the message and it will appear in red under the customer information when you search for the customer to add them to a new transaction or when they're already added to a new transaction. The customer will not see this message.
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