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Customer and Supplier Master Data

Create and maintain customer and supplier records: numbers, addresses, payment terms, credit limits, VAT numbers and deactivation.

AccountantFinance ManagerSuper AdminLast reviewed 03 Aug 2026

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Customer and supplier records are the master data behind receivables, payables and the entity picker on the transaction form. They live at Accounting > Entities > Customers and Accounting > Entities > Suppliers.

Adding a Customer

Click Add Customer (or the round button in the bottom corner on a phone). The customer number is generated for you. Complete:

  1. Contact Name and Email — both validated; the form will not save without them.
  2. Company Name and Phone — optional.
  3. Billing Address — street, city, state/province, postal code and country. A shipping address can be captured too, or marked the same as billing.
  4. Payment Terms, Credit Limit (ZAR) and VAT/Tax Registration Number.
  5. Notes — free text.

Each customer can be viewed, edited, deactivated and reactivated. Deactivating is confirmed with a dialog and marks the record inactive rather than deleting it, so history is kept. The list can be searched, filtered by active or inactive and sorted, and it paginates.

Adding a Supplier

The Suppliers screen works the same way. Each new supplier, and each imported one, takes the next vendor number for the year, such as VEN-2026-0001; an existing supplier keeps its number, and the number cannot be edited. The form captures company name, contact name, email, phone, address, payment terms, a bank account number for payments, a VAT/Tax ID and notes. Payment terms run from Net 7 through Net 90, plus Cash on Delivery, Due on Receipt and Prepaid. There are no separate bank name or branch fields.

Suppliers can be filtered by status, sorted and paged, and are deactivated rather than deleted.

Where These Records Are Used

The entity picker on the New Transaction form draws on both lists, so capturing a transaction against a customer or supplier is a matter of selecting the record rather than retyping names and VAT numbers. Note that the Vendors tab on the Accounts Payable screen is not this master file — it is derived from bills in the aging report — and the Customers tab on Accounts Receivable does not load anything at all.

Bulk Loading

Neither screen has an import button. To load records in bulk use Accounting > Transactions > Data Import with the Customers or Suppliers entity type. Be aware that the import columns are narrower than the on-screen forms: customer import takes name and email plus a few optional fields and has no address, VAT or payment-terms columns, so those still have to be filled in by hand.

Tip: Capture the VAT registration number on every business customer as you create them. It is required on a valid South African tax invoice, and adding it later means reissuing documents.