Controlling Customer Create and Edit

Allowing stores to edit or create customers

From your main reporting page, click "settings" and then "Customer Handling". The page to control customer operation will appear.

Remote Store Customer Creation has several options:

• Stores cannot create new customers.
  This option is used when stores must only select from existing customers, or customers are defined in external systems first and then load into the Point of Sale.
• Stores must talk to head office and fail if they cannot.
  This option tends to be used if stores are allowed to create new customers but for some reason require confirmation from the head office server. Typically this might be authorisation codes or external system identifiers. This is not a widely used option.
• Stores try to talk to head office but can create locally if needed.
  With this option the lane will try and communicate to head office but will fall back and create locally if any problems. The disadvantage of this method is that under network down or error conditions there may be a visible pause while Pos times out talking to head office, but the advantage is that customer records are allocated their final Customer-Id immediately.
• Stores can create locally without talking to head office
  With this method, new customers are created locally and allocated a temporary customer id, which is generally a negative number. The details of the customer transfer to the server at some stage and the server will typically renumber the customer to a new permanent customer-id. The advantage of this technique is that customer creation is very quick, but the number allocated is renumbered later. This renumbering is often not an issue as these numbers tend to be internal use only and have little impact to shop level operations.

If you wish to allow stores to edit customers, tick the "Allow Remote Stores to edit existing customers" on. This edit option is specifically only to allow editing of current customers, edit ability does not imply create new customers. It is valid to allow edit but not create, or create but not edit, or both, or neither.

Address Capture and Storage

Capturing and storing addresses is a surprisingly complex area due to the wide variation of address standards and exceptions. Couple this with typical retail requirements to support analysis and reporting using this information, along with country and language variation and the complexity becomes clear.

If this is all sounding too complex, you typically don't need to understand it all - simply go into "Settings" then "Customer Handling" and select how you want addresses to be captured.

Fieldpine has a set way of storing addresses information in the database, but allows you to select which method best suits your needs. Customers (accounts, etc) can have what we refer to as "contactdetails", which are the details of an address belonging to that customer. Customers can have multiple contactdetails in advanced cases.

Customer Record		Contact Detail Record(s)
		Delivery/Shipping Address	Billing/Postal Address
Susan Free A typical individual customer	»	123 Some Street My Town
Ace Business Limited A typical business that has multiple delivery addresses	»	12 High Street My Town	PO Box 1234 Sydney
	»	1a Finance Plaza Perth	PO Box 1234 Sydney

Keep in mind that within Fieldpine sales are made to customers not delivery addresses or contactdetails. You can select a contact detail as part of a sale, but the actual sale is recorded as belonging to the customer

For a given single address, eg "123 Some Street, My Town", we record 3 different versions into the database

1. The original "as typed" version
2. The conversion of "as typed" to Full Address, or vice versa of Full Address to address components
3. The automatically cleaned version(s) if you apply address post processing logic

Capturing Addresses

Addresses can be captured using either Raw Format, where the entry is typed into a single box, or individual fields where the parts are entered seperately. Raw Format is generally better for physical addresses to cater the unexpected variation that occurs, but individual fields can be better if you want to capture precise and cleaner data.

Raw Capture		Fields Capture
Enter Delivery Address 123 Some Street My Town		Enter Delivery Address Street City ZIP/Postcode

Once the initial typed version is entered, Fieldpine will attempt to parse and create the alternative version if possible. If you entered a Raw capture, we try and fill in the individual fields version. If you entered the fields version, we merge to the Raw capture version. If you are using address cleaning services, then these services populate fields reserved for that purpose.

The process of converting one format to another is not always straight forward and you should not expect perfection in this step.

When using "fields capture", the range of fields can vary by country. Under "settings" "Customer Handling" you are able to select which fields make sense in your environment, so that special case fields are not shown during normal operation.