Setting Up Reserve Customers

1 What are reserve customers?
2 What does it do?
3 Can the reserve customer be kept informed?
4 Benefits of Reserve Customers?
5 How do you set this up?
- 5.1 VAT Number
6 Why the account holder is a reserve customer?
7 How to use this
- 7.1 Audit Trail

What are reserve customers?

These are customers who store their stock with one of your warehouse customers and your warehouse customers are in full control of the stock, the allocation and despatches.

All charges for the storage would be sent to the main stock-holding customer.

What does it do?

It specifies a reserve customer code against a specific rotation / rotation with the line belonging to the specific person named in the reserve code name field.

Can the reserve customer be kept informed?

Yes, there are a few ways to achieve this:

Authorisation required - Prior to the order being processed authorisation has to be declared on the order. This is generally done by your customer providing that authorisation or you asking the reserve customer for the authorisation, it depends on how strict you wish the controls to be.
Notification of movements - The reserve customer can be notified by email that a transaction of their stock has taken place, letting them know something has left their account.

Benefits of Reserve Customers?

In the past, we have seen many companies dissolve and the courts always upheld the ownership of the stock if the reserves were known to the warehouse and identified in this manner, so it is a safeguard for the owner of the stock if it is identified at the warehouse

How do you set this up?

Before opening the reserve customers through the navigation you need to switch it on at the customer level.

Customer Maintenance is used to switch this on.

It should be noted that if you select this option for a Customer, there is no way to de-select it, once a customer has reserves you can not undo it at any point in the future.

To set up Reserve Customers for a Customer, Go to the Navigation panel and click ‘Customer Reserves’ under Customers. In the filter options fill any field, Customer Code, Name, or Site Code. The result grid shows matching customers. Double-click the one to open the 'Reserve Customers' window. If there is only a single entry as result, it will open the window directly.

In Reserve Customers, you will need to enter the Reserve Code that you wish to use, along with at least the name details, and in order to bring this reserve account into use you need to be sure to tick the “In Use” option.

Reserve Customers

The following fields are mandatory - Reserve Code, First Name, Surname, In Use. If data was imported from an earlier version then only the surname field may be completed, if you update then you will have to complete this correctly based on the mandatory fields

VAT Number

This field should be completed where you transfer goods into a company account where that company has a VAT number.

The ownership changed flag will not be set to true on a transfer order where the sending customers VAT number agrees with the receiving reserve customers VAT number.

Why the account holder is a reserve customer?

By default we add the account holder as a potential reserve customer, this can be used when you simply do not know who the owner is, and is used by the account holder sometimes to then allow the distribution of the stocks to the reserve customers.

e.g. From the above image, JOE is the account holder but we have a JOE reserve customer underneath the main account code as well.

How to use this

When goods are landed into a customer account which has the “Use Reserves” option switched on then you will be forced to enter a reserve code into the field which is then held at the rotation level for the duration of the storage.

If the customer sells some of his stock to another reserve customer the transaction can be a simple TRANSFER order to move the stock around.

Audit Trail

Recent improvements to Vision Warehousing have introduced an Audit Trail for any changes made to Reserve Customer's details

This means you can now update a Customer Code, Name and some other details that were not possible before.
As Reserve Codes are legally owned by the Reserve Account holder, changing any details might (either intentionally or accidentally) change ownership, therefore any changes to Reserve Customers should be made with caution.

Audit Trail - Shows a record of all the changes made to Reserve Customers associated with the selected main Customer at the top of the screen.