Customers can be created with very little information - just a first and last name really but of course that doesn't have a lot of benefit to you or your customer. Adding emails allows you to send receipts via email, and special promotional information. Adding addresses let you report on where your customers come from. The Customer Group provides you a way to target promotional pricing to specific groups of loyal customers such a social media friends and followers, sports league or museum members and so forth. Customer Tax Class let's you designate whether some customers are taxed at a different rate or exempt form sales tax.  

To begin creating a new customer, navigate to Customer>>Customers>>click  on "+ Add New" button (located at the top-right of the screen).

Details Tab

Enter first and last name (required) and any contact information you wish along with optional phone, mobile and birth date information.  The address entered will be set as the initial default address.

Addresses Tab

You can have multiple addresses for each customer including recipient names for shipping and billing addresses. You can also designate which addresses are the default.

Settings Tab

This tab allows you to enter key setting for the customer.

• Enable/Disable - Allows you to deactivate a customer.  If disabled, it will no longer show up in searches. You can reactivate the customer at any time.
• Tax Exempt - If checked, customer purchases will not be subject to tax.
• Tax Class - Sets what tax the customer's purchases are subject to. Tax classes are assigned to specific sales tax rules so you can define very specifically what taxes apply to customer's in a tax class.
• Customer Group - Allows you to attach your new customer to a specific group of customers. If you have customers that get special pricing this is especially important because the Special Pricing feature will allow you to select those customer groups that the promotion applies to. For example if you send out special pricing to students, club members, museum donors, team coaches or any other special group of customers you want to create a Customer Group for them and assign them to it so they can automatically get their special pricing.
• Marketing Consent - Flag used for marketing purposes.
• Preferred Receipt - The Front Register will read this setting to automatically determine whether the user will get a receipt, and if so, whether their receipt is printed, emailed or both!

The remaining tabs (Transactions, Gift Cards, Store Credits, Orders, Credit Account, Special Orders) are not essential to creating a customer record and will be covered in other articles.

Next Step:  Importing Customer via a CSV File >>