Modelling customers

ERPNext
1

I’m considering using ERPNext in our company, mainly for tracking opportunities, creating invoices, and tracking support issues. I’m a bit unclear on what to consider a “Customer” in ERPNext. It seems to be both the entity to bill to, and the entity to provide support for.

Our company creates software for GPs. The GPs often work together in group practices. Logically, it make sense to consider a group practice a “customer”, since we typically sell to the group practice as a whole. Invoices however are sometimes sent to the individual GPs instead of the group practice. The same goes for support: sometimes an issue is created for an individual GP instead of the whole group practice.

Is there an easy way to model this in ERPNext? I could model the GPs as “Contacts” belonging to the “Customer” that represents the group practice, and add a “Tax id” to the Contact (or the billing address) instead of the customer. But I’m afraid that deviating too much from the intended use will break stuff in future ERPNext updates.
Edit: Or should I model both GPs and group practices as Customers, and add a way to link them together?

2

Hi there @Baco! I believe you can used the “Customer Group” for this kind of set-up. You were correct that GP’s are your customers since they will be billed from the services you provided. “Services” offered here are also items but are non-stock, not purchased and is_sales only. You can test this first if it will work accordingly especially in the accounting side. You can create SO for your Customer Group and for our individual GP’s for service billing. Hope this helps!

3

ERPNext has customer group but you would not be able to raise invoices against a customer group. You could try to add a custom field to your Customer doc type, to track groups. Later on probably you could use this to show on your invoice