Breww makes it easy to manage multiple customers under a single customer group. You can sync all invoices and credit notes issued to customers in a group to a single “customer” in your accounting software. This is especially useful if you have a single billing entity for a group of customers set up with a direct debit mandate in your accounting software. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Create a customer group
- Go to Customers → View → Customer groups.
- Click the New customer group button and enter the details for the group.
- Under the Invoicing heading, select the option to “Always sync invoices/credit notes to customer group (ignore default)” to sync all customer invoices and credit notes to the group.
Step 2: Add customers to the group
- Go to Customers and click on the customer you want to add.
- Click Edit in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
- Scroll down to customer details and select the customer group from the Customer group field.
Step 3: Map your customer group to your accounting software
- Go to Integrations → Accountancy.
- Select your accountancy platform and head to the Tools tab.
- Click on the Map and download customers button.
- Map the customer group to a single “customer” in your accounting software.
And that’s it! Any invoices or credit notes issued to customers in the group will now be synced to the customer group and to the single entity in your accounting software.
Billing and delivery addresses
Customer groups give you the flexibility to decide which addresses are shown on invoices for customers within a customer group. If, when creating a customer group, you check the option to “use this customer group address and name as the billing address on invoices raised to customers in this group”, then you will be able to retain individual customers’ delivery addresses on invoices whilst having all billing addresses show the invoice address set on the customer group itself, which is practical if you are selling to a wholesaler, or pub chain where billing is handled centrally. Equally, if you use the customer group for accounting only but wish to have the billing and delivery address on an invoice be those set on the individual customer, then you can uncheck this box.
Setting if the Customer group and or its sub-customers receive automatic emails
You can define for your customer group and its sub-customers whether automatic invoice and delivery note emails should be sent.
Setting if the Customer group entity receives automatic emails
The key to ensuring customer groups are only emailed when you want them is knowing that whether your customer group is emailed invoices and delivery notes automatically is defined by your account defaults. If your defaults are to automatically send emails, and you do not want your customer group to receive automatic emails, you should leave the email contact for the customer group blank.
Automatic invoice emails for Customer groups
The first thing you decide is whether the group entity itself receives invoice emails; this is decided by your account default settings for “When should Breww automatically send an email with the PDF invoice attached (with the exception of SIBA orders)?”, this is set in Settings → Order/invoice settings → Sales order & invoice settings under the heading of Invoice issuing settings. Whatever you set here will apply as default and determine if the customer group receives invoice emails.
If a contact email is set on the group, this will automatically receive emails if you use any of the “automatically send” options above; if you do not want to send automatic emails to the customer group itself, do not set a contact email, as the next settings only affect the group’s sub customers.
Automatic delivery note emails for Customer groups
Similarly to the above, if you have set in Settings → Email settings the option to Automatically send delivery note PDF by email to customer to “Automatically send when delivery is completed (sent 10 minutes after to give time for signatures to be added)” and a contact email is set on a customer group they will always receive a delivery note email.
Setting if the Customer group’s sub-customers receive automatic emails
There are a couple of variables which determine if a customer in a customer group receives an email invoice. Whether customers receive automatic emails is typically also defined by your account defaults, but there are two things that change this. The first is whether your customer is part of a customer group, in which case the customer group’s automatic email settings override the account default. The second is if you set a specific automatic email setting on the customers themselves, this overrides both the account default and any customer group they are a part of.
Setting automatic email settings on a customer group
When editing or creating a customer group, you will have the option to choose whether Breww should “Automatically email invoices to this group’s customers” and whether Breww should “Automatically email delivery notes to this group’s customers”, what you choose here will override the account defaults on whether emails should be automatically sent, but will not override what you set on the customer themselves.
This setting does not impact if the customer group itself receives automatic emails, this only defines whether the individual customers in the group will receive automatic emails. Customer groups are defined by your account defaults in Order/invoice settings and Email settings.
Setting automatic email settings on individual customers within a group
You can set on individual customers their own automatic email settings by editing the customer and, under customer details, choosing an option for “Automatically email invoices” and “Automatically email delivery notes”. If you choose a setting here, this will override the account default and anything set on any customer groups they are a part of.
