The first event to occur in a lifetime of a job would have to be the creation of a customer record. Once done, the record can be used again and again on subsequent jobs, accumulating a history of work done for a particular customer. Under certain conditions more than one record may need to be created for the same business entity. An example of this situation would be work performed for a individual stores in a supermarket chain, with the billing and regional offices being located elsewhere. The general guideline for when more than one customer record may be needed is that the record for a different physical address is required.

The Contact Maintenance screen located under “Contacts” in the Action menu allows the user to create a Customer record. The following steps will cover most of the steps one is likely required to undertake to create a customer record in TSM.

1. Go to Action menu and select “Contacts” or select Contacts from the Task Bar. The Contacts Maintenance module will appear. The Contact Details tab will be displayed first and features primary contact information for the first customer record to be displayed.<
2. Press “New” in to left hand corner. The Save and Cancel buttons will become active.<
3. For a company record enter the Company Name or the First and Last Name for an individual.<
4. Entering the Customer ID is not compulsory. If left blank, TSM will generate it automatically based on the company name or last name entered. However if the business employs some sort of a coding system for Customer IDs – you may want to enter it at this point.

Hint: For businesses performing a lot of work at residential addresses it may be beneficial to set the Customer ID to the street number and name, which in turn allows for quick searches based on that information: such as “19 SMITH” or “10A STATION”. Whilst this means that customers located at the same street address but in different suburbs will have to be differentiated somehow (“19 SMITH” and “19 SMITH1” for example) the arrow buttons at the top of the module allow to quickly navigate between adjacent records in order to locate the right one.<

1. Enter the Address. As you can see there are several fields available, allowing this information to be broken up into constituent parts: Address (i.e. the house number and street), City, Postal Code, State and Country. The Post Code and City fields are automatically cross-referenced against a database of suburb names and postcode numbers provided by the Post Office, that ships with TSM.<
2. Enter the contact details. There are several fields available and although titled “Phone Work”, “Phone Home” etc, do not necessarily require to be filled with that exact information.

Note: This information becomes important when printing a job card for a technician. The standard TSM reports display all of these fields even if some may not have any data in them. This ensures that if some data is missing, the recipient of the Job Card has at least some contact information available to them.<

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The steps above will ensure that the bare minimum of information is entered resulting in a useful TSM Customer record. The user can now proceed towards entering Job Cards for this customer.

The Customer Maintenance module offers several other features which are covered below.

These fields located in the lower right quarter of the Customer Details tab can be used for entering this customer’s billing address. This will be useful when the main address is different from the billing address which is often the case with larger companies. There are 2 ways of doing so:

1. Simply enter the full billing address in the field thusly labelled.<
2. Select a Customer ID - The Billing customer has to exist for this to be possible, however you can Press “Create New” on the search screen to create a new record that can then be used as a billing customer.<

Whilst the first method may logically seem like the simplest and the most straightforward, the second may become necessary if the same business entity is likely to have more than one billing office. Bearing in mind that a TSM invoice is always created for the Billing Customer on a TSM job, a Billing Customer record may be a better way to handle the billing process.

Invoice terms are used for standardising billing terms and are necessary for Aged Debtor reporting in TSM. Invoice ageing in Debtor Reports can be calculated from either the date the invoice is due (based on Invoice Terms for this customer) or the invoice date on the Invoicing tab. To create an Invoice Terms entry:

1. Either go to the Utilities Menu → Code Setup → Invoice Terms<
2. Press “New”.<
3. Enter the Code ID for the invoicing term such as “30” for 30 days.<
4. Enter the Invoicing Term Description such as “30 Days”. Note that it is the description, not the Code ID that will be displayed on the Contact Maintenance module and therefore should be made descriptive.<
5. There are 2 options for configuring Invoice Terms:
   • Standard – enter the number of days to set the invoice due date to, counting from the invoice date.<
   • Date Driven – enter the day of the month the invoice is due. There is an optional field to enter a second number of date. If the invoice date is equal or less than this number of days from the day of the month the invoice due date is automatically extended to the next month. The value of 31 in this second setting automatically puts the due date to the end of the next month.«
6. Press “Save”.<

There are 2 notes fields in the bottom left quarter of the Customer Maintenance screen which allow logging notes that do and do not automatically appear on the job card – Job Notes and Notes respectively. These are memo fields and can be used for logging any volume of text, such as service history taken from another software package or general notes pertaining to work for this customer.

The full list of fields located on this tab as well as their purpose can be found in the TSM Manual. Some fields here contain functionality affecting data elsewhere in TSM – a good example being “Account Status” which can be used to set a customer account on hold – preventing any new jobs being logged against their record. Others such as Customer Source can be used as labels for reporting purposes. Below is a list of the most common customer presets that can be created using the settings on this tab.

This option allows you to preset the default job type and/or Service fee. Any job created for this customer will automatically be set to contain these settings.

1. Right click on the Customer Type field. The Code Setup screen will come up.<
2. Press “New” and Enter the Code ID and Description.<
3. Enter the default Callout Fee is applicable. This value will be automatically populated into the Service Fee field on the Invoicing tab of a job card for any new jobs for this customer. The Service Fee setting in the Utilities→Setup→Job Cards Page 1 will be over-ridden with this setting.<
4. Enter the default Labour Type if applicable. This setting will ensure that the default Labour Type for any job created for this customer will be set to this value with all the associated presets.<

This option, located in the top right-hand corner of the General Info tab allows some useful presets employed when printing invoices out of TSM. There are 5 options available:

By ticking the Site customer tick box on the General Info tab and saving the record it is possible to denote this record as a Site customer. This may be useful where a significant number of site customers is necessary for defining the addresses for technicians to attend. A warning will appear when a job is created with a site customer record used as the billing customer.

The Contacts tab contains a grid that can be used to store the details of multiple contact persons within the company this Customer record represents.

Note: The functionality of the “New”, “Delete”, “Save” and “Cancel” buttons changes to relate to the Contact records in this grid, not the Customer record itself. Switching back to the other tabs on the Contact Maintenance module returns their functionality to relate to the Customer record.

Pressing the Swap with Primary Contact Button will swap the selected Contact record with the personal contact details found on the Contact Details Tab.

This feature allows one to link documents to this customer record. See the TSM Manual for a full listing of its functionality.

There is the “Don’t link to Jobs” option unique to the Documents tab on Contact maintenance which when unticked will result in this particular document automatically linking to any new jobs for this customer.

This feature may be useful for linking a document required for work with this customer – such as a site description, OH&S requirements, etc.. Similar to the Job Note it basically allows data from the customer record to be automatically transferred to the job & can be used in many different ways.

Tip: Where a large number of customer records requiring a large number of linked documents, it may be good practice to systematise linked document storage. A directory on a networked drive available to all users of TSM under the same drive mapping can be set aside. The TSM Customer ID can be used for naming directories pertaining to the same customer. This system will ease electronic document storage, linkage and retrieval.

For full functionality of this feature, please see the TSM Manual. TSM Lite Customer history contains just 4 active tabs:

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