34.1 Introduction

This section describes how LedgerSMB implements customers and vendors.

When creating a customer or vendor in LedgerSMB, you have to first create a contact. This contact can be created as either a company or person. However, this contact can’t itself be used directly as a vendor or customer. Instead, you have to create a “credit account” which is linked to the contact. A “credit account” can have the role of vendor, customer or both.

LedgerSMB works equally well using a person as a vendor, customer, or both.

A contact can have multiple customer and/or vendor type accounts. Each account has its own language settings, shipping address, contact data and payment conditions. Basically, you will create multiple accounts when you have to record different data for any of the items listed above.

Note that at least as of LedgerSMB 1.9, a contact can only be linked to one bank account. This means that if your contact as a vendor has separate bank accounts from your contact as a customer, you will need to set them up as different contacts.

The contact entity itself is used - albeit not as customer or vendor - in the context of credit risk management (See Chapter 42 starting at page 42).