29.1 Introduction

In order to understand how to use customers and vendors, this section describes how LedgerSMB implements these concepts.

When creating a customer or vendor in LedgerSMB, you have to create a company ¹³¹³The LedgerSMB database model allows much more flexible constructs involving humans as well as companies or legal entities, but this chapter discusses the web interface exposed functionality only.. However, this company can’t itself be used as a one. Instead, you have to create an “account” ¹⁴¹⁴These “accounts” are referred to as (entity) credit accounts as well as customers or vendors. which is linked to the company. An account can have either the role of vendor or customer. Due to this construct, a single company can both be vendor and customer which is sometimes desirable.

One company 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.

The company itself is used - albeit not as customer or vendor - in the context of credit risk management (See Chapter 37 starting at page 37).