OFFICE EXPRESS HELP ASSISTANT

Professional Software for Professionals

Inserting Customers

If you have viewed the previous help sections you are ready to begin inserting customers into the Office Express database. As mentioned in an earlier lesson, you should gather all the information you have already about your customers before adding your customers to Office Express.

You can insert customers from two different places in Office Express. The Office Express Home page allows you to quickly insert customers. Or, if you click the Customer List icon in the navigation bar at the top of the screen you can work from the Customer Page. To insert from the customer page either press the Insert key on your keyboard or click the right mouse button. If you clicked the right mouse button a menu like the one above will be displayed. Select the Insert option.

When you select the Insert option, the Customer Edit Wizard will be displayed. The Customer Edit Wizard consists of five different pages. This topic will focus on the first page of the wizard, assigning the customer a category.

ASSIGNING A CATEGORY

As described in the About Categories lesson, Office Express requires that every customer be assigned to a category.

The first page of the wizard lists all the categories you have in your category list. Simply highlight the category you want the customer to be assigned to and click the Next button at the bottom-right of the wizard.

NOTE: You can change the customer's category at any time. After you have all your customers inserted you can fine tune your customer list later on and quickly move customers from category-to-category.

DEFINING THE CUSTOMER ADDRESS

Notice under the wizzard page header the are three tabs, Service Address, Billing Address and Phone numbers. Click on each tab to enter or edit that information.

Office Express requires that you at least enter a last name for each customer. All other fields are optional. When you move the mouse cursor over a field a tip will be displayed with further explanations for the field.

TIP: If you right click on the First name, Street and Town fields a menu will be displayed listing choices for that field. Office Express builds a list of streets, towns and zips as you insert customers. Note, when using this feature on the Street field, enter the house number first!

TIP: If the service address and the billing address are the same, click the Copy to Billing Adress button so you won\'t need to retype the same information into the billing address.

Click the Next button to move to the next page in the Wizard.

PROPERTY INFORMATION

The next page is for misc. customer information. None of the fields are required. This page has fields that are useful when printing workorders and route sheets. The Employee msg and Workorder notes are useful in this context. If the customer is a weekly maintenance customer, be sure to assign the proper service day-of-the-week for the customer.

The Property Name field is used in situations where you do work for a customer or a corporation that owns multiple properties. This allows for the property name to print on a bill that is mailed to the main office. Click the Next button to move to the next page in the Wizard.