More with Customers

There’s more to Customers than what meets the eye. In this section, we’ll look into all the important things that we’ve not explained before.

Associating Templates

The invoices, estimates, notifications mails etc. that you send out to your customers can be unique to each client. In Zoho Billing, you can personalize your templates such that their design is different and very client-specific. These specifications are not only useful to meet business expectations, but also to bring about the perception of a personal touch among your clients.

Setting default PDF and mail notification templates

You can associate pre-defined default or customized pdf and email templates to your customers as desired. This includes the ones you have created and added to the Zoho Billing template gallery.

To associate templates to a customer:

In the Associate Templates pop-up page, you can create, select and assign a customized PDF or Email Notification templates for your customer as you desire.

Selecting PDF Templates

Selecting Email Notification Templates

Stopping All Reminders For A Customer

Zoho Billing allows you to send automated payment due reminders to your customers. These reminders can be configured in the Settings module for selective durations as you desire. Now, if you do not want to send these reminders to a specific customer you can stop them.

To stop reminders for specific customers:

Payment reminders will be stopped for this customer immediately. Later, if you want to re-enable the reminders for this customer, you can do so.

Sending Email To A Customer

While doing business with your customers, you might want to communicate something important related to your business to your customers. You can send such emails directly from Zoho Billing, easily. Additionally, you’ll be able to attach a list of unpaid invoices list to the email and send it to your customers.

To draft emails and directly send them to your customers:

Insight: Only the email addresses that you’ve added to the customer will be shown in the dropdown of Send To and Cc. If you want to instantly add an email address, click + Add Contact Person in the Send To dropdown; enter the contact person’s details and click Save and Select.

Cloning a Customer

At times, you may find yourself in a fix when your customers pay for invoices in different currencies. In that case, you can duplicate the customer twice and set different currencies, one for each. You can do this by cloning the customer.

To clone a customer:

A Clone Customer screen will open where all the details of the customer will be auto-populated. Make sure all the details are correct and click Save.

Pro Tip: If you have not activated the customer portal for the original customer, then you can activate it for the cloned customer.

Merging Customers

When you import customers from other systems, it is possible to have multiple customer profiles for the same person in the Customers module. You can merge them together to make them as a single customer and bring all the transactions under a master customer.

Warning: Once you merge customers together, they cannot be separated back as individual customers. All transactions associated with them will be listed under the master customer and the other customers will be marked as inactive. You can mark the inactive customers as active again, but the transactions under them will be erased.

Prerequisites: The customers you are merging must have the same currency to merge them together.

There are two ways to merge customers in Zoho Billing depending upon your preference:

Merging Multiple Customers

It’s best to follow this method, when you want to merge more than two customers together.

To merge multiple customers:

Marking a Customer as Inactive

To mark a customer as inactive:

Deleting a Customer

You might want to delete a customer when it has become obsolete. However, you cannot delete a customer if transactions are recorded under it. You must delete all the transactions before you can delete the customer. If you want to retain the transactions, you can mark the customer as inactive.

To delete a customer:

Alternatively, you can also delete individual customers by selecting them.

Sending Unpaid Invoices List To Your Customers

At times, customers might delay in making the payments for the invoices that you’ve issued to them. It could be due to a variety of reasons. However, you can send them a copy of all their unpaid invoices and urge them to make the payments that are due.

There are two ways to send a PDF of unpaid invoices list to your customers in Zoho Billing:

Attach them while sending a customer statement

To send an Unpaid Invoices List along with sending a customer statement:

Exporting Customers

The export option in the Customers module allows you to export the customers and the contact persons in CSV or XLS format. As soon as you export, the data will be downloaded to your system in the format that you’ve chosen.

To export customers:

Bulk Actions

Bulk Actions allows you to perform a particular action on a group of customers. You will be able to send or print customer statements of a group of customers in a single attempt, update customers, enable Customer Portal, mark customers as active or inactive and delete customers. Let’s look into how you can perform bulk actions in Zoho Billing.

Bulk Send Customer Statements

When you select customers in bulk and send bulk statements, each customer’s statement is sent to their email address respectively. The statements that are sent to every customer will be of the same period.

To send bulk customer statements:

Insight: You can send a maximum of 25 customer statements at a time. So, it’s best to select a maximum of 25 customers whenever you want to send customer statements in bulk.

To print customer statements in bulk:

Insight: You can print a maximum of 25 customer statements at a time. So, it’s best to select a maximum of 25 customers whenever you want to print customer statements in bulk.

Customers - Print Bulk Statements

Bulk Update

Bulk Update allows you to update fields such as Currency, Payment Terms, Price Lists and Custom Fields in the customers module in a single attempt.

To bulk update:

More Actions

You can enable Customer Portal in bulk for your customers, mark customers active or inactive and delete them.


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