Ability to "Archive" Customers

Hi,

It would be great to have a way to archive customers that haven’t ordered in a while, so that their information and order/activity history etc. is retained, but they are no longer considered “active” and so are hidden or categorised differently when searching on Breww. Xero has this as a feature, which ideally would be triggerable from Breww when an account is archived.

Is this something you’ve looked at before, and might be doable?

Cheers,
Greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for getting in touch.
At the moment, all you can do is ‘delete’ a customer, which will remove them from your customer lists. Their data is not deleted, and you can still click through to their page from invoices etc, where you can view their data and restore them if needed.
We could add something in between, such as an ‘inactive’ badge, and the ability to show/hide in-active customers on the main customer list.
I’ll add this task to the list and let you know when it’s done.

Cheers,
Matt

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Hi Matt

On this - if we were to do Sales/order reporting, would the data from these ‘‘deleted’’ customers still show up in reports?

Hi Alexa,

Yes, they would and you can also go to one of these orders and still click through to the “deleted” customer. From there you can restore them too if needed, they just don’t show in the lists of customers.

Let me know if you have any other questions on this.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi there,

Coming back to this, from a CRM/decluttering perspective I think this needs to be looked at again. As a brewery with historic accounts, it would be good to be able to hide/make accounts inactive without fully deleting them - either because they are closed, are no longer customers or have never ordered since we got Breww.

I would otherwise delete them, but we sync with QuickBooks so I would be very worried incase it deleted from QuickBooks too, which would be a nightmare for satisfying HMRC etc. It makes going through a proper list of accounts an absolute pain as I have to go in and manually delete them all from the spreadsheet, which seems a mandatory, unnecessary chore when the solution is quite simple.

I understand that you can ‘archive’ accounts that have ordered, but that doesn’t offer a solution to the above problem with syncing to accounting software.

Cheers,
Joe

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Thanks, Joe.

Breww will never delete a customer from QuickBooks under any circumstances, so you don’t need to worry about that. For similar reasons, if you try to delete a customer in Breww that’s had invoices, Breww will instead “mark them as deleted” rather than actually delete them.

To filter them out of the main list of customers before Breww has native functionality for this, you could:

  • Create a customer tag of “Archived”.
  • Apply the tag of “Archived” to all customers that you’d like archived.
  • Create a customer list named “Active customers” and make it a dynamic list to only include customers that don’t have the “Archived” tag.
  • Switch to view this list on the main customers page.

I know that’s not perfect, but it should be helpful in the short term and would also mean that when proper “archiving” functionality comes to Breww, it would be easy for you to find the list of customers who need archiving.

Thanks Luke, I’ll give it a shot! Good news re: won’t delete anything from QuickBooks.

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Has a feature to Archive customers been introduced since this thread was last updated?

You’ve got me questioning myself, but no, you still cannot archive customers. You can still delete customers, and in some cases, Breww will instead “mark them as deleted” and allow you to restore them.

Hi Luke - is this a hard or soft delete? - Is the data still available at all?

The data is still available if they were soft deleted. Breww will soft delete them if there is any “connected” information and hard delete them if there is no connected information. If they are soft deleted, then you are able to restore them with all their original data, but if they were hard deleted then the data will be gone, I’m afraid.

Examples of the sorts of “connected” information that will result in a customer being soft deleted rather than hard deleted include:

  • Any orders/invoices
  • Any credit notes
  • Any contacts
  • Any payments

If you’re looking to see if a customer’s data is still available (and restore them if so), then please see How to quickly bulk/mass delete customers and restore deleted customers. I hope this answers your question.