Creating master records in Intacct is a simple process.  Here’s a few highlights:

Under the LISTS menu of Accounts Receivable we will find the Customers list choice.  Keep in mind that the terminology of “Customers” can be changed!  Many not-for-profit implementations decide to change the term “Customers” into something like “Donors” or “Members” but the steps are the same.

On a navigation note, clicking the plus symbol will open a screen to create a new customer, while clicking the word “Customers” will open a listing of all existing customers.  Here’s the default Customer Information window when adding a customer:

As we enter a customer, consider a few points:

• All required fields have a vertical red line next to the field (like the “Name” field shown here)
• Your system might have “Smart Rules” or other logic tailored to your company. If that’s true, you’ll be warned of any extra steps when you save the record.
• In a Multi-Entity Shared environment we need to take care with WHERE we create the record. If the record is created at the Parent entity it can be used at different Child records as desired.  Creating a record at the Child entity means it isn’t available to other entities.  See the MES post for more  details.

The Contact section of the customer is useful when you need multiple addresses for the same company.

In the above example, we set up separate Contacts called BILLTO and SHIPTO under the same customer to be used when appropriate.  This is a powerful idea that can allow us to have multiple addresses under a single customer.