Customers

A customer is who you invoice. A delivery address is where the gas goes.

For most accounts they are the same thing: one household, one address, and you will never think about the difference. A pub chain is one customer with a delivery address per pub, and one invoice.

Finding somebody

The list is a table: name, payment terms, phone and email, what they owe on unpaid invoices, and how much of that is overdue. Search by name, press Most owed first to put the biggest debts at the top, or Owing only to hide everyone who is paid up.

Open a customer to see everything about them on one page, with a menu down the side to jump between sections: their details and terms, their invoices (what they owe and what is overdue), their orders, the cylinders they hold, their addresses, agreed rates, and merging or their data.

What to put in

Trading name is what your driver would recognise, so use the name on the door rather than the one on the paperwork. Legal name is for the invoice when the two differ.

Payment terms decide whether the driver takes money at the door.

• Pay later (on account). The driver hands the gas over and drives off, and the driver’s list says so (“Pay later: nothing to take”). Once the order is delivered Bottle raises its invoice, due in the customer’s days to pay (or your usual days if left empty), and emails it with the PDF, your bank details and a card link if Stripe is set up.
• Pay before delivery. A card link, paid before the order goes out.
• Pay on delivery. The driver takes payment at the door, cash or card.

A new customer starts on the default for their kind, set under Default payment settings in Business settings › Invoices: business customers pay later and homes pay on delivery unless you change it. These are only defaults: change any customer on their own record, at any time. Every order for them follows their terms unless you pick otherwise on the order.

Home customers who order through your online shop pay there. The home default is for orders that come in another way, such as a phone call or a message.

Invoicing says how often Bottle bills them: weekly, monthly or quarterly. That invoice carries the gas delivered on account in the period, rent on any cylinders they are holding, and any deposits owed back. Left blank they are never invoiced by Bottle, which is right if you raise invoices somewhere else or they pay at the door. See Invoices.

Notes is the part drivers actually use: gate codes, which door, who to ask for, how many they usually take.

Finding an address

Every address box starts with the postcode, because that is what a customer says down the phone and what puts them on the map. As you type, the box offers the postcodes that begin that way, so a slip is caught before it is saved. Find lists the doors at that postcode; pick one and the address fills in. A farm the list has never heard of, or a business without the address list switched on, is Enter the address by hand, one press away.

Listing the doors at a postcode uses Ordnance Survey’s address file, which needs a key (OS_PLACES_KEY on the box; a thousand lookups a month are free). Without one the postcode is still checked and the address is typed.

Delivery addresses

Give an address on the same form when you add the customer, and that is usually the end of it. Add another address when an account grows a second door, and Change to correct one: a gate code changes far more often than a street does.

Each one can carry a name, which is your word for it rather than ours: Camden branch, Yard, Site 3, Back gate. The notes on an address are the part a driver actually reads: gate codes, which door, who to ask for.

An order for a customer with one address goes there without anybody choosing. With several, the order says which, because guessing would send gas to the wrong pub.

The invoice address

The addresses are a table: each address, its delivery times (or “Any time”), what to do if nobody is in, and which one invoices go to. Use for invoices on any address makes it the one printed on their invoices and sent to Xero as their postal address. With only one address, that one is used.

When adding or changing an address, Use as the invoice address does the same. Only one address can be the invoice address, so ticking it on a new one says which address it replaces.

Where the van stops

An address is put on the map from its postcode, and a postcode is a centroid: the middle of a patch of streets, not a doorway. The router then sends the van to the nearest road to that point as the crow flies, which is right almost everywhere and wrong in the places that matter. The far side of a railway, a river with the bridge a quarter of a mile up, a dual carriageway with no crossing: all of them are a road the van can reach and a walk nobody should make with a 47kg cylinder.

Set where the van stops on the address opens a map with the pin on it. Drag it, or press where the van should pull up, and save. From then on rounds are planned to that spot: the driving time, the order of the drops and the arrival time all follow the pin rather than the postcode.

The postcode’s own point stays on the record underneath, drawn faintly on the map so you can see how far off it was. This is an override, not a correction, so re-running the geocoder can never quietly undo what a driver learned the hard way on a wet Tuesday. Back to the postcode clears it.

Worth doing for the handful of doors that need it, rather than all of them. Most addresses are fine.

Delivery times

Some addresses can only take a delivery at certain times. A school will not have a lorry on site while children are arriving. A pub takes nothing before the cellar man is in. A trading estate locks its gates at four.

Delivery times on an address, then one line per rule. Each says which day it applies to, or every day, and either the hours it is open or that it is closed. So:

• “Not before ten” is one rule, every day, 10:00 to closing time.
• “Closed Sunday” is one rule, Sunday, closed.
• A place that shuts for lunch is two rules on the same day.

A rule for a named day wins over a rule for every day. So if you set “every day, 10:00 to 16:00” and “Sunday, closed”, Sunday stays closed.

What the planner does with them:

• If the van would get there early, it waits, and the round shows how long. That waiting counts towards the driver’s day, so the time the van gets back stays right.
• If the van would get there after closing, the drop comes off the round. Better to know in the morning than to send somebody for nothing.
• If the address is closed all day, the order stays waiting when you plan that day, and says why. Move it to a day the address is open.

No rules means any time, which is most addresses.

Homes and businesses

Mark a customer domestic when you deliver to a home. It decides the payment terms a new customer starts on: most businesses let trade customers pay later and ask homes to pay at the door. VAT is set on each product, not by the kind of customer.

When a pub changes hands

Move the delivery address to the new account. Orders already taken stay with the customer they were taken for, so an old invoice does not change owner.

Agreed rates

The customer page lists everything you sell with the list price beside what they pay. Set a rate where you have agreed one, and put them back on the list price when it ends. Anything you have not agreed is simply the list price, so there is nothing to keep in step.

Two records for one customer

It happens, particularly once orders arrive from a shop: somebody orders as orders@pub.co.uk on Monday and Orders@Pub.co.uk on Friday, or gives their mobile with a +44 the second time.

Bottle spots these and says so in two places: a Possible duplicates panel beside the customer list, which is where you would work through them in one sitting, and at the top of the customer itself: “This looks like the same customer as Camden Lock Grill Ltd.” It tells you what it matched on, which record it would keep, and how many orders would move.

Matching is on email and phone only, never on a name, and a phone number counts however it is written: +44 7700 900123, 07700 900123 and 07700900123 are the same number. Names are never matched, because four pubs within ten miles are all called The Anchor.

Nothing is ever merged automatically. One office phone can cover four pubs, so this is always a suggestion with two answers: Merge them, or Not the same, which is remembered and never asked again.

You can also merge from the bottom of a customer page when you have spotted a duplicate yourself. Either way, its addresses and its orders move across.

The duplicate does not vanish. It stays, marked as merged and pointing at the account that was kept, because an order taken against it an hour ago still has to lead somewhere.

Archiving

Somewhere you no longer deliver gets archived rather than deleted. It disappears from the round and stays on old paperwork.

Keeping them, and not keeping them

How long a dormant customer stays, what to hand over when somebody asks what you hold, and how to erase them when they ask, are all in Privacy and retention.