Design your customer structure

Addresses

Billing and delivery addresses, owned by a company or by a person.

An address belongs to an organization, to a contact, or to both. Which one you choose decides who can use it at checkout.

Before you start: decide the ownership rule for your business. In most B2B setups delivery sites belong to the company. A technician should be able to have goods sent to the Erfurt workshop whether or not they personally created that address.

Company addresses or personal addresses

Owned byWho can use itUse it for
The organizationEveryone at the companyDelivery sites, the invoice address, the head office
The contactThat person onlyA home office, a service van, a field engineer's site
BothThat person, filed under the companyRare. Prefer one or the other.

Checkout falls back from the person to the company: a contact with no personal address of their own uses the account's addresses. That fallback is why company ownership is the sensible default. It works for the new starter on their first day.

Create an address

  1. Open the company in CRM › Organizations and go to the Addresses tab, or open the person in CRM › Contacts and use their Addresses tab for a personal one.
  2. Select New address.
  3. Choose the Organization and/or the Contact it belongs to. At least one is required.
  4. Choose the Type: billing or shipping out of the box. The list is yours to extend on Configuration › Value lists › Address types.
  5. Fill in Company, Recipient name, Street, Street 2, ZIP, City, Region, Country and Phone. Street, ZIP, city and country are required; country is a two-letter ISO 3166-1 code: DE, AT, CH.
  6. Tick Default address if this is the one checkout should preselect.
  7. Save.

Two fields people fill in wrongly

Company on the address is the line that gets printed on the label, and it is often not the organization's legal name. A delivery to a building site or a subsidiary needs the name that the goods-in desk recognises.

Recipient name is who at that address should be handed the parcel. In B2B this is frequently a department ("Warenannahme") and not a person, and that is fine. Leaving it empty on a large site is how a delivery sits at reception for two days.

Defaults

is_default marks the address checkout preselects. With the store setting for one default per type switched on, which is the shipped behaviour, marking an address as default clears the flag from the owner's other addresses of the same type. Switch it off and an owner can end up with two default shipping addresses, at which point checkout picks whichever the database returns first. There is no good reason to switch it off.

Default is scoped to the owner and the type, so a company can have one default billing address and one default shipping address at the same time.

What to check

  • Open the company's Addresses tab. Every address shows its type, the recipient, the country flag and whether it is the default.
  • Exactly one address per type should carry the default flag.
  • Check the country code is the two-letter code and not the country name. Deutschland is not a valid value; DE is.

When it goes wrong

Checkout offers no delivery address. The contact has no personal address and the organization has none either, or the person is not attached to an organization at all. Check organization_id on the contact first.

Goods went to the wrong site. More often a default problem than a data problem: the buyer accepted the preselected address. Check which address carries the default flag for that owner and type.

An address cannot be saved. Street, ZIP, city and country are all required and country must be exactly two characters. A create that specifies neither an organization nor a contact is refused; an address has to belong to somebody.

Next

  • Segments — group companies so pricing and campaigns can target them.
  • Checkout — how the address is chosen at order time.