About Customer Accounts

Before you can create sales invoices for the goods and services that you sell, you must set up each customer Person or company that buys goods or services from your organization. as an account In this context, accounts are organizations or people that you conduct business with, such as customers or vendors. Account is a standard Salesforce object. Certinia accounts can be any Account Record Type..

Accounts are part of the underlying Salesforce platform. If you are an existing Salesforce user, you may have some accounts set up. You can use accounts of any record type with Accounting.

Each customer account must have an appropriate accounts receivable (AR) control account assigned to it. When the customer account is specified on a document, this GLA is used to create the appropriate posting to the general ledger Central repository for all your business transactions. Each transaction is posted to a general ledger account.. To save time, and to avoid potential errors, you may want to set an AR control account to use as a default on accounts. See Account and Account Type Settings for more information.

You can select a local GLA in the Accounts Receivable Control field, but you can only select one as this field has a one-to-one relationship. This means that you can link an account to only one company. If you have one customer that purchases from more than one company, that customer requires an account for each company it purchases from. This is because each company requires its own local GLAs. See example in the table below.

One Customer Supplying Numerous Companies

Account	Company	Accounts Receivable Control
Customer 1 (FR)	My company in France	French local GLA
Customer 1 (DE)	My company in Germany	German local GLA
Customer 1 (ES)	My company in Spain	Spanish local GLA

Warning:

If you switch to a local accounts receivable control account in the middle of a fiscal year, you must generate the balances for both corporate and local accounts to obtain the complete data.

See "What is an Account?" and related topics in the Salesforce Help for more information.

The sequence of tasks is as follows:

1. Customize the page layout of your Account pages to include selected custom sections, fields and related lists. See "Customizing Page Layouts" in Administrator Setup (First Install) for more information.
2. Create or edit your customer account details.
3. Click Save to save your unvalidated customer account.
4. Click Validate Customer on the account detail page.
5. Click Back to Account and, if necessary, correct any reported errors.
6. [Optional] Repeat the validation until you get a success message.
7. [Optional] Click Validate Billing Address and Validate Shipping Address if your org is enabled for external tax calculation and you want to verify that the addresses are valid (typically only US and Canadian addresses are recognized). See Validating Addresses for External Tax Calculation for more information.
8. Click Save.