Customers and approvals

"The shop does not work" is the most common customer report, and it almost always means one of six specific layers: sign-in, the person, the company, the price, the address, or delivery. The questions below follow that order, then cover registrations and approvals.

A customer says the shop does not work. Where do I start?

Get four details first: the email they signed in with, what exactly they saw, and at which step, whether the login, the price, the button or the checkout. Those usually identify the layer on their own. Then check in order, cheapest first: can they sign in, may this person order, may anyone at this company order, are the prices right, and is there a delivery address. See When a customer cannot order.

A contact is signed in but cannot place an order.

Check the role. A viewer may look and not buy; a requester submits for approval and cannot place. Both are working as configured. Open the Role & permissions section on the contact: it shows the grants they hold and whether they may act on them, and a contact who is blocked or whose registration is pending keeps the role but cannot use it. See Contacts and roles.

How do I model a customer with several delivery sites?

There is no organization hierarchy, on purpose. One legal entity with several sites is one organization with several shipping addresses. Several legal entities with separate invoices and separate credit are several organizations, grouped in a segment if you price them together. The test is the invoice: if it gets its own invoice and its own credit limit, it is its own organization. Decide before the first order, because orders cannot be reassigned afterwards. See Organizations and hierarchies.

A customer of fifteen years registered through the shop as if they were new.

You now have two records and half an order history on each. Decide which survives, normally the one with the customer number and the history, move the contacts to it, set the terms and price list on it, and block the other rather than deleting it. Orders cannot be moved between organizations. Then switch on Refuse duplicates on for VAT ID and customer number so it does not happen again. See Customer data hygiene.

How do I approve a registration, and what does approving do?

Open CRM › Contacts, select the Awaiting approval queue, open the applicant and select Approve registration. That enables the sign-in, sets the contact to active and activates the company they founded; the password they chose works immediately. Then finish the job on the organization: customer number, price list, payment terms, credit limit. Search for the company first, because the commonest real problem is duplication; fraud is rare. See Approve a registration.

Nobody knew a registration application had arrived.

The Notify these addresses about applications setting is empty, so the application landed in the pending queue and waited for someone to think to look. Put real addresses in it, and decide Auto-reject applications after so a stale application closes itself rather than sitting for a year. See Self-registration.

Can I set a spend limit for a buyer?

Yes, one personal limit per contact under Cost centres › Personal limits. The limit on its own decides nothing: an approval rule that checks it decides what happens above it, approval or refusal. The order_approval_limit field on the contact is stored and shown, but not checked when an order is placed. See Buyer limits.

Is there an approval workflow?

Yes, in the procurement app. Approval rules under Procurement › Approval rules decide which spend needs approval. A cart that trips a rule becomes a purchase request, its approvers decide in sequence per cost centre, and the order is created only at final approval. Nobody is notified by email, so agree with the customer how approvers learn that something is waiting. See Approval models.

A large request is stuck and nobody can approve it.

Open it under Procurement › Purchase requests and read whom it waits for. A default approver is the cost centre's accountable contact, fixed at submission; a cost centre without one leaves the request waiting for nobody. An administrator can approve every layer at once or cancel the request. Then give the cost centre an accountable contact so the next request does not stall. See Approvals that get stuck.

The customer says they have budget and the shop says there is none.

Reservations, usually. Requests awaiting a decision hold budget, and their number is booked invoices while this one is committed orders. Settle or withdraw the open requests and the money returns immediately. Then check the period, because a budget for last year has nothing to do with an order dated this year. See Approvals that get stuck.

Should I delete a contact who has left the customer's company?

Block, do not delete. Blocking keeps the orders they placed attributed and the timeline intact; deleting removes them from the platform identity service too. The Contacts list has a Last activity column that flags a record as stale after 90 days; sort by it and work down. A live login for someone who now works for your customer's competitor is a real problem, not an untidy one. See Customer data hygiene.

Why can nobody at a company order?

Open the company in CRM › Organizations and read the banner at the top. "Blocked — this company may not trade" means the organization status is blocked; find out who set it and why before you change it. If there is no banner, check that the person is attached to this company at all; a contact with an empty organization is a standalone record with no company prices, terms or addresses. See When a customer cannot order.

What is the difference between a delivery block and a blocked status?

Both are stored on the organization and shown on its record and in the list filters. Status blocked marks a company you do not want to trade with; a delivery block marks one whose deliveries are to be held. Agree with your Innendienst and your ERP what each means in practice. A delivery block set during a payment dispute in March and never lifted is a customer who has quietly stopped buying, so review the Delivery blocked filter every few weeks. See Block a customer.

A rule-based segment is not picking up new customers.

Rule segments read a local projection of customer metrics, and if the schedule is off, every revenue rule keeps evaluating the numbers of the day it stopped, with no error anywhere. Open CRM › Segments and look at Last recomputed, then set Refresh customer metrics and Recompute rule segments to at least daily, in that order. See Customer data hygiene.