All details related to a customer will be found within their account in Customer Service.
Contact Information
The header bar will contain the contact information for the customer, such as their name, email address, and phone number. To change any of the detail, you will click the pencil icon to edit. This will allow you to add phone numbers or labels to differentiate between multiple methods of contact within the account. If you needed to archive the customer for any reason to not allow additional appointments to be scheduled, you will use the Archive Customer button. You will still be able to find their contact information in the future in your Customer Service list by using the All toggle. Any history will be retained for the Archived customer; they will just no longer be found within your Active Customers list.
Miscellaneous Information
Also found in the header bar are four items that you might need to quickly have access to in the future.
The Accounting Key field in the header of a customer’s account in your Sera Admin Portal displays the link between customer records in Sera and your accounting software. It will match the customer’s display name in Quickbooks. This key will be populated in the batch files generated to sync transactions into Quickbooks through Saasant to ensure that records are matched to the appropriate customer.
Accounting Keys will be created using the First Name and Last Name fields found within your customer's Sera account. If there are duplicate customers with the same name, a number qualifier will be added to the end (see picture below) to ensure that those two accounts are not merged in the transfer of the invoices and payments into your Quickbooks account.
Note: If your customer's first name and last name are blank as a part of imported data, there could be instances where the Accounting Key field is populated only with a number. You can update this information at any point using the steps below.
There might be circumstances, such as the misspelling of a customer's name or a name change due to marriage, where you might be required to alter their name. When this name change is completed in Quickbooks, you need to edit the Accounting Key in Sera so as to not disturb the delivery of transactions into the proper account.
Changing this key is completed by clicking the pencil icon to edit in the upper right-hand corner.
Note: Edit capabilities of the Accounting Key field are limited to Super and Admin level users only.
When the user edits the Accounting Key, they will be required to enter a note detailing the reason and to also check an acknowledgment that altering this linkage could potentially cause issues keeping transactions in sync across the two platforms.
This note and a history of the change will be documented with a timestamp and the user’s name who made the change as a system note in the customer’s Notes tab for tracking purposes.
To the right of the Accounting Key, you will find any active Membership programs that you have on this customer’s account. The details will be found on the Membership tab.
Next, is the saved Payment Method. This can be either ACH or Credit card. Technicians, customers or your internal staff will be able to save a payment method on file for the customer during a payment transaction connected to an invoice or just by clicking the pencil icon to edit. The saved payment method will be used to auto-charge the customer for any membership renewals and can be used to process subsequent payment transactions by any user.
The final section of the header is referencing the Customer Portal login information. When a new customer is created in your Sera Admin Portal, an invitation to your Customer Portal is sent to them via email. They will be prompted then to create a password. You will be able to see the date of their last portal login in that field. If the customer has never logged into their portal, Not Available will be displayed. If your customer did not set up a password initially or can not recall their existing password, you are able to send them a reset password link via email by clicking the hyperlink for reset password. It will automatically send the email to the primary email address on their customer account.
More information on your Customer Portal can be found here.
Under the header in your customer account, there are seven tabs housing any system information related to this customer.
Service History
Within this tab, you will find an Address Card for each address listed on this account. The Address Card will contain the name of the location, the full address, the address type and the tax information.
On each Address Card is the option to edit the address information, edit the tax details or to schedule an appointment within a job. Please see the article on Scheduling an Appointment for more information.
Within that same section of the Service History tab is the merge addresses utility. This is found under the Address Actions menu.
If you need to alter the tax status of the address, click Edit Taxes within the address card. This will open a window for you to see the current Tax Settings and give you the ability to edit those.
Note: If you change an address to Tax-Exempt, you will be asked for an Exemption reason. For more information on how to add, remove, or edit existing Exemption Reasons, please see our article on (link)Tax Setup.
If there was ever a time when the customer’s account showed a duplicate address, you can select Merge Addresses. You will enter the address that you would like to keep in the left-hand box and the address that you would like to merge into the right-hand box.
Note: Please merge addresses cautiously as this action is final and can not be undone.
If you need to add a new address to this customer’s account, click the Add Address button, found under the Address Actions menu. Enter the address into the Search Address field and it will verify against Google’s maps database to find a matching location. If the address you are looking for is not able to be found within the Google Maps database, you will be presented with a map. You can locate the nearest point to the address on that map and place a pin on the map. This will allow coordinates to be used to locate the address. You will want to place the pin as close as possible to the location as this could affect directions for your technician.
If you have a P.O. Box to enter as the Billing Address, select the Billing Address toggle and then the Enter Manually hyperlink. This will allow you to bypass the Google address validation for this Billing Address. For more information see our article on Entering a P.O. Box within Sera.
Below the Address Cards is a list of all appointments for the addresses above. You can access any of those appointments by clicking the Appointment Number or the Job Number. The date the appointment was scheduled for, the current status, the service category, and the current balance are a few of the items that you will find in the Service History table.
Note: A row is populated for each appointment. If you have multiple appointments on one job, you will see separate rows for each appointment found within each job.
Notes
In the Notes tab, you will find all of the notes related to their account including text messages and email communications that were sent to the customer. Generally speaking, notes that are system-generated can be found by switching the toggle to All from Standard. The default when you access the page will be Standard. Notes that are marked as Important will present at the top of the list always with a red exclamation mark symbol. Notes that are marked as visible to the customer will show with an eye icon to the left. The eye icon with a slash through it will indicate that the comment has been hidden from the customer and will not be present in their portal or on the copies of the quotes and invoices. A search bar is available to the right to allow for easy location based off of known key words. You can change the amount of notes that will display on each page by using the left-hand dropdown and also change the sort order of the notes in that same area. To add a new note directly into the Customer's Account, use the +Add Note hyperlink.
Quotes
You will find all of the quotes created for this customer in the Quotes tab. Quotes in the status of Draft, Open, Accepted, and Denied will be present in the table and you can find any Archived quotes by toggling to All versus Active. You can create a quote separate from a job, such as a quote for a Membership or a point-of-sale purchase by clicking the New Quote button.
Invoices
In the Invoices tab, you will find all of the finalized invoices and any credit memos for this customer. The rows will show the total for the invoice, any balance due, and the date of the batch that they were generated as a part of, if applicable. Credit Memos, displayed with a CM icon, are generated systematically when an invoice previously included in a batch is canceled for editing purposes.
Equipment
The Equipment tab will contain any on-site equipment that has been entered for this customer by either an admin user or a technician. A card will be listed for each piece of equipment and will contain all of the information entered for that system, components, warranty related information, etc. Equipment will be tied to a specific address, and you can use the dropdown at the top of the screen to filter addresses if multiple exist on a customer’s account. There is a search bar available to use keywords in the name of the equipment to filter. Choose the number of pieces of equipment to display per page by using the dropdown on the left-hand side. Use the pencil icon to edit the equipment details. Active equipment will be visible by default, and archived equipment will be available by toggling to All.
You can add new equipment to the customer’s account by clicking the Equipment Actions hyperlink and using the +Add Equipment utility.
Note: please see our article on Equipment Type setup for maximizing the benefits of equipment capture within your account.
Membership
The Membership tab will contain any membership programs affiliated with this customer. This can include expired, active, and inactive programs. Use the +Add Membership button to add a membership directly to a customer’s account. You will see a gold crown to the right of the customer’s name when an active membership is present on their account. When the membership has reached its cancellation date, the crown will display silver. Active membership program details are displayed in the header of the account.
Communications
The Communications tab will house all communication preferences for this customer. You can enable and disable communications entirely, by type (email or text), or by individual notification by using the On/Off toggle. Alter the preferences and select Save Changes at the bottom of the screen. The reason typed into the pop-up box along with the user’s information and a timestamp of the change will be visible within the View Change History button for audit purposes.