The customer view is the full picture for one person: who they are, what they have bought, their loyalty standing, and what they owe. This page covers what the view shows and the check that decides whether a customer can be charged.
Opening the customer view
Attach a customer, then tap the pinned customer row on the sale. The full view opens for that person.
What the view shows
| What you see | Worth knowing |
|---|---|
| Who they are | The phone number is shown partly hidden, so a full number is never on display in the store |
| Lifetime spend and visits | The whole company, in the company's own currency, not just this store. See the three reaches in Attaching a Customer |
| What they have bought | Till sales and back-office sales in one list, with nothing counted twice |
| What they tend to buy | Drawn from what they actually bought, not from a survey |
| Loyalty standing | Their membership, tier, and points, when they are a member. See below |
| Account and owing | What they owe, what is on file, and their store credit, when your sign-in includes account work. See below |
If there is no email address on file, and you are allowed to edit customers, the screen offers to add one, because that is what a receipt by email needs.
Loyalty
From the customer view you can see whether someone is a member, what tier they are on, and how many points they have. You can also enroll them here, which needs a connection.
Two answers look the same and are not:
- Not a member. They exist, but have never joined.
- Loyalty unavailable. The app could not read the loyalty system just now. The points show as a dash rather than as zero, so you are never misled into telling a customer they have none.
Loyalty never stops a sale. If the loyalty system cannot be reached, or your store does not use loyalty, the sale carries on as normal. A customer's points balance is read live, so it is one of the things the customer view cannot show with no connection. Spending points is part of taking a payment, covered in Balance-backed Tenders, not part of this screen.
The record that is not a person
When a sale has no named customer, it is recorded against one shared record that stands for all of the store's cash sales, rather than against a person. If you open that record, you will notice it is kept deliberately simple: no lifetime figures, no account, no preferences, and no way to edit it. This is on purpose. Editing it would change the store's own accounting, not one customer's details, so any change is made in the back office instead, and the screen tells you so if you try. The same applies to the cash-sale record at every branch, not just at your own store.
When a customer cannot be charged
At the payment step, the app checks whether this customer may trade at all. There are four reasons it refuses:
- The customer has been disabled.
- The customer has been frozen.
- The customer trades in a different currency from this store.
- The same currency problem, in stores set up not to allow mixed currencies on one account.
For a disabled or frozen customer, the app asks the back office's own rule directly, so the answer matches the store's records. Someone permitted to act on frozen accounts in the back office is permitted here too. For the two currency reasons, the app applies its own version of the rule, and it applies it earlier, at the point of sale, so a fixed till may accept a sale this one refuses.
The check stays quiet in two cases by design: when no customer is attached at all, and when the customer simply has no account set up yet.
Account, and paying on account
What a customer owes, what is on file, and their store credit are read live and shown only when your sign-in includes account work. There is a route from here to take a payment against the account, covered in Balance-backed Tenders.
A credit limit is set in the back office and is looked for in order: first on the customer, then on their customer group, then on the company. If a limit looks wrong, walk all three levels before assuming the figure is broken.
With no credit limit set at any level, the behavior on account is narrow, and only this is true:
On account is refused if the customer is not already in credit. If they are in credit, it works only up to the amount they have in credit. Anything beyond that is refused.
A credit refusal follows how the sale is being taken, not the customer on their own. So before looking at the customer record, establish which way the sale was being taken. Setting or waiving a credit limit is done in the back office.
When the network drops
The customer view depends on live figures, so it waits for the connection rather than showing anything out of date. Attaching a customer still works. See Working Offline.