How Do I Group Customers Together?

How Do I Group Customers Together?

shopVOX makes it easy to "Group" multiple customers together for reporting purposes, especially for invoicing. If you have worked with schools, government organizations like the military, franchises, or big box stores to name a few. You know many times you end up with multiple customers even though these guys are technically the same company, organization, or unit to name a few. They have different billing processes, and different people with different needs. To learn more about how to group contacts together check out this article.

Grouping is set inside the customer while Department is set inside of a contact to help you group, organize, or compartmentalize your customers and contacts. This article attempts to give you an idea of how to use each effectively.

How do I add a customer to a group?

Simply go to the customer that you want to add to a specific group, and edit that customer, find the Group near the bottom of the page from the dropdown list (or create one if it's not there) and save the customer.

If you do not see group within a customer, you probably have the field hidden, you can unhide the field by going to Company Menu >> Account Settings >> Forms and making sure "customer groups" is checked to be visible

(Click here to learn more)

What can I do with custom groups?

Here are 2 common examples of how you might use customer groups...

Example 1: Schools

A common scenario is a college, club, school might have several different "departments", but you want to keep these organizations grouped together for invoicing purposes, or general reporting.

Let's say you have a school "shopvox University" and there are several departments within that school. You would create a customer for each department/club, etc you do business with. You can then create a group called "shopvox University" and assign all the customers to this group.

Now when I pull select reports, this group will appear to help me associate two customers together as the same organization.

Example 2: Military

An example in the United States is you might have a branch of the military like the United States Air Force that has thousands of squads or units, and I might do business with a dozen of those squads.

In shopVOX, I would create a customer for each squadron/unit. I would then go into each of those customers, and assign them to a "group" called ""United States Air Force - USAF"

I then might pull a report that has this group as a column, record of data for further filtering.

Example 3: Other Alternative Reporting

Not as common, but still useful is the need to group customers together for reporting reasons. Not because they are the same company, but maybe because they are the same "Kind". Maybe you want to group all your wholesale customers together. The reason this isn't as common is because there are better ways to do this, but the idea behind this example is to show that groups aren't limited to grouping companies.

This grouping can currently be exported from shopVOX via a number of different reports:

Invoices Daily report

Invoices Monthly

Invoices Yearly

Customers Report - Contacts

Customers Report - Details

These reports will have a column called "Group". With these columns you can filter this data in a spreadsheet program for more advanced reporting.

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