Explaining Customers, Contacts, and Addresses

Background

Historically we have conflated customers, contacts, and addresses together. This practice was forced on us by Syspro in the distant past, and never rectified. It is generally regarded as bad practice, and we have never been able to handle more than one contact or address per client/customer.

ERPNext's approach is to offer three separate DocTypes: Customer, Contact, and Address.

Customers

Customers are our clients, and they can be set up as either an individual or company. Since our customers are invariably businesses, we should set them up as companies in ERPNext.

Franchise Examples

• RE/MAX - John Doe
• Cramer Group Real Estate - Urban Nest Real Estate

We do handle franchise owners frequently in the form of real estate companies such as RE/MAX. In this case, since we are not dealing with franchisor, we need a way to distinguish one franchisee from another, which we do by including the franchisee in the Customer name.

Contact

Contact is a separate DocType that can be associated with various other DocTypes. This allows setting up Contacts for the Customer, Lead, Sales Partner, or Supplier DocTypes, among others. Of course, a single Contact may be associated with more than one Document.

Address

Address is a separate DocType that can be associated with various other DocTypes, in the same way that the Contact DocType allows. Note that a phone number and email address can be added to an Address; this is for contacting the location, rather than a specific individual, which should be handled by a separate Contact instead.