Customer Requirements and Defaults

ServiceCEO lets you control what fields need to be filled out before a customer record can be saved. It also lets you define the values for certain fields when a new customer is created. You can also control how you would like ServiceCEO to verify that the names of new customers are not the same as any existing customers.

For more information, see the three sections below:

Customer Requirements

Requirements are the fields that must have a value before a customer record can be saved. To mark do so:

Select Tools > Options or press CTRL+O. The Options dialog box appears.
Click Requirements from the Categories bar. The Requirements/Defaults Options dialog box appears.

Click Customer Options. The Requirements dialog box appears.

Select the appropriate Prospective check box for each field you want to make required when creating a prospective customer. Prospective customers are customers without any jobs.
Select the appropriate Normal check box for each field you want to make required when creating an active customer. An active customer is a customer with at least one job.
Click OK.

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Customer Defaults

To define the default values for all new customer records:

Select Tools > Options or press CTRL+O. The Options dialog box appears.
Click Requirements from the Categories bar. The Requirements/Defaults Options dialog box appears.
Click Customer Defaults. A blank customer record will appear.
Enter the values you would want to appear by default for a new customer into the General, Detail, and Custom Fields tabs.

Caution!

Caution:
You will not be able to define a default value for all customer fields. For example, you cannot define any location fields as a customer default.

Click Save and Close. The default values are saved. All new customer records will be created with these values, although you can always edit these values when you are actually creating a new customer.

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Duplicate Checking

Control how ServiceCEO checks to see if a new customer name is the same as any existing customer names by setting the following options:

Select Tools > Options or press CTRL+O. The Options dialog box appears.
Click Requirements from the Categories bar. The Requirements/Defaults Options dialog box appears.
Select the Check for duplicate records before saving new ones check box to enable ServiceCEO to search all existing customer records before saving a new record. The other two check boxes will become active.

Note!

Note:
If this check box is selected, ServiceCEO will, when a user attempts to save a new customer record, check the database for potential duplicate records. If any potential duplicates are found, the Duplicate Warning dialog box appears displaying the customer record(s) that could be considered a duplicate of the new one. You will have the opportunity to either continue creating the new record or switch to the existing record.

Select the Use advanced name checking (nicknames, sounds-like) check box to have the system search for similar names when checking for duplicate records.
Select the Check last names only check box to have the system check only last names when searching for similar names.

Note!

Note:
Due to the complexity of many names, we can't guarantee that the advanced name checking or check last name functionality will find all of the names one may think are sufficiently similar to the new name. While this functionality will find most of the similar names, for those users uncomfortable with this uncertainty, we recommend that you use the basic duplicate checking feature.

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Back to: Defining Requirements