Design your customer structure

Organizations and hierarchies

Create the companies you sell to, and model a customer that has several sites.

An organization is a company you sell to. It is the record everything commercial hangs off, so get the identity fields right the first time.

Before you start: know where your customer master data lives. If your ERP owns it, which is the usual case, decide that now and import instead of typing. See Deciding your system of record.

Create an organization

Go to CRM › Organizations.
Select New organization.
Enter the Name. Use the legal name as your ERP has it, so the two systems can be reconciled by eye.
Enter the Customer number. This is the number the company carries in your ERP, and it is unique per tenant. It is the field that makes every later integration possible. Fill it in even if nothing reads it yet.
Enter the VAT ID (USt-IdNr.). Depending on your store settings this is optional, validated for format, or checked against the EU VIES service.
Enter the Industry (branche), free text, for example automotive, retail, logistics. Segment rules can select on it, so agree on spellings before you have four variants of "Automotive".
Set the Lifecycle stage: lead, prospect, customer or churned. It describes pipeline position and grants nothing.
Set the Status: active or blocked. This one decides whether the company may trade at all.
Set the commercial terms: payment terms, credit limit, price list, delivery block. Leave them empty to inherit the store defaults. See Set payment terms and a credit limit.
Assign Markets if this company only exists in some of them. Empty means every market.
Save.

Which fields matter, and why

Field	Why it matters later
`customer_number`	The join key to your ERP. Unique per tenant.
`vat_id`	Identity, tax treatment, and duplicate detection.
`branche`	Segment rules, campaign targeting, reporting.
`lifecycle_stage`	Pipeline reporting; never an access decision.
`status`	The access decision. `blocked` stops trading.
`price_list`	Which prices this company sees.
`external_team_id`	The link to the platform team. Filled by the platform.

settings is a free-form key-value area for whatever an integration needs to park: an ERP id, a sales-area code. Do not put payment terms, credit limits, price lists or delivery blocks in it. They are columns of their own, and a second copy in settings is a second answer to the same question.

Modelling a customer with several sites

This is the question that comes up within an hour of starting, and the answer is not a parent field.

There is no organization hierarchy. Organizations are flat: an organization has no parent organization. That is deliberate. Most "hierarchies" people ask for turn out to be one of three different things, and each has a better answer.

What the customer means	Model it as
One legal entity, several delivery sites	One organization, several shipping addresses
Several legal entities, separate invoices, separate credit	Several organizations, one per entity
A group you want to report on or price together	Several organizations in one segment

The test is the invoice. If it gets its own invoice and its own credit limit, it is its own organization. If it only receives goods, it is an address.

For a group of legal entities you want to treat as one commercial unit, create a segment, for example group-mueller, and put the members in it. The segment is then what pricing and campaigns target, while each entity keeps its own customer number, terms and receivables.

Splitting a company into several organizations later is expensive. The order history, the metrics and the segment memberships all sit on the record you split, and orders cannot be reassigned after the fact. Decide "one entity or several" before the first order.

Import instead of typing

Beyond a handful of companies, create them through the integration instead of the form. A customer master import needs, at minimum: name, customer number, VAT ID, and the price list code. See Connect a system and Field mapping.

Duplicate detection runs on create. Depending on your store settings, a create that collides on vat_id, name or customer_number is refused and tells you which record already exists. On an import that is the behaviour you want, because the alternative is two files for the same company.

What to check

Open the organization. The header shows the customer number, VAT ID and industry; badges show status, lifecycle stage and payment terms.
The Commercial terms panel shows what you set, or the inherited defaults.
If the company is blocked or delivery-blocked, a red banner says so at the top of the page. No banner means it can trade.
The Orders tab is empty until the company has ordered, and the figures beside it stay blank until customer metrics have been computed at least once.

Contacts and roles — add the people who order.
Addresses — billing and delivery sites.

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Design your customer structure

Create the companies, the people, the addresses and the groups. Once, properly.

Contacts and roles

Who may see prices, place orders, and approve them.