Customer Accounts Overview

Customer accounts are your clients, who are the recipients of the travel-related services you provide. To identify and aid your customers better, GlobalWare uses the customer account type. It contains various ways of identifying particular customer needs through such fields as Customer Type, Interests, Contact, Memo, Report To ID, and Form of Payment. These fields enable you to target various customers for mailings and special offers. They also aid you in creating reports and in tracking various types of information about your client base.

If you are interfacing from a GDS and use the proper format for the customer name and address in the PNR, the interface program checks to see if the Account ID is already in GlobalWare. If it is not, the interface program adds it. If the proper format for the customer name and address is not in the PNR and the client is not in GlobalWare, the transaction being interfaced is added to the Invoice table with an Account ID of NOACCT.

For individual accounts, it is suggested that you use the phone number, name, or some combination for the Account ID. For example, using the first three characters of the last name plus the phone number provides a unique code that is also easy to find if you know the last name.

Use the Edit Customer screen to modify employee accounts. For details, see Edit Customer Screen.

Report To ID

The Report To ID is primarily used for the generation of corporate reports. Generally, the Account ID and the Report To ID on an invoice are the same. However, they can be different.

For example, a company can have several subsidiaries, each responsible for paying their own travel, but the home office wants to get a consolidated report. In this case, each subsidiary has its own Account ID, but the Report To ID for them all is that of the parent company.

Accounts Receivable

The customer account represents who or what is to be billed for accounts receivable. Billing statements maintain the balance forward for the account and the last statement date. It is important therefore that the business account set up for statements refers to the entity that your agency will bill. You cannot consolidate statements by Report To ID because statements include the individual account’s balance forward. You can, however, subtotal statements by sort fields. For example, if you need to report on Company XYZ on a consolidated basis, and its departments individually, and you generate statements, you need to determine if the company is billed or if individual departments are billed. If it is the company, the company must be the account ID and departments can be stored in a Sort field. If it is the departments, they must be account IDs and the company should be the Report To ID.

Market ID

There might be situations in which you want to market to individuals in an account, but not bill or report on that level. For example, you might generate reports for a corporate account, but want to include individuals on leisure travel mass mailings. Or, you might bill agents for the accounts receivable they extend and, therefore, set up each agent with an account (sometimes referred to as "house" accounts), but you want to target those travelers. Because addresses and e-mail addresses are stored with the Account ID, these individuals need an account ID also. The individual’s account ID is stored in the Invoice in the Market ID field. You could then have an invoice like this:

Invoice Field	Example Data	Description
Traveler	DOE/JOHN
Form of Payment	Receivables
Account ID	DELL-RD	Dell R&D account for billing.
Report To ID	DELL	Dell consolidated account for corporate reports.
Market ID	DOEJOHN	John Doe account for marketing.

Market account IDs can have any customer type; for example, you might use the provided "P" (personal) type or create a new type, "M" (marketing). Market IDs can be generated automatically by the Interface. How the interface creates market IDs is determined by fields in Customer Types. For more information, see Travel/Customer/Revenue Types.

Customer Type

The Customer Type field provides another way to identify your customers. GlobalWare enables you to edit, add, and delete customer types in order to tailor them to your specific needs.

For example, you might want to create a customer type for your prospective accounts. To do so, enter the Travel, Customer, and Revenue Types function and add a new customer type for these accounts. Thus you can track these prospects with ease. You can exclude accounts from Account Maintenance by customer type. (For more information about adding, editing, or deleting customer types, see Travel/Customer/Revenue Types.)

If you want to generate billing statements, the customer type for the account must be B (business). You can generate billing notices for all accounts, regardless of the customer type.

Several reports make use of customer type. Sales Analysis includes an analysis by customer type. Corporate Review Transactions, Accounts Receivable Reports, and Applied History Report can be run for a specific customer type. Invoice Query report can be sorted and subtotaled by customer type.

Interests

The Interest field offers the ability to track the specific interests of your customers. You can also run certain reports for only those accounts with a specific interest. For more information, see Interests Overview.

Form of Payment

The Form of Payment field is designed to reduce the amount of data entry necessary when creating invoices for your customers. After you enter a form of payment into a client's account, the program automatically utilizes that information when generating invoices. There are four forms of payment from which to choose:

Form of Payment	Description
A=Agency Plastic	Payment by credit card where the agency functions as the merchant through a bank. GlobalWare enables you to enter default credit card information.
C=Cash/Check	Payment by cash or check.
P=Plastic	Payment by credit card. GlobalWare enables you to enter default credit card information.
R=Receivable	Payment through the issuing and remittance of receivables statements to the client on a regular basis.

The Salutation

The Salutation field's main purpose is for use in the mail merge function of GlobalWare. You can use this field in the generation of letters for mail merge in the word processor. The field enables you to customize the salutation of each letter.