Customers and tax invoices

The Customers screen holds two lists on separate tabs: customers you sell to and suppliers you buy from. They look similar but they are used for different things.

Adding a customer

The basics are name, phone, email and free-text notes. That is enough for a shop that just wants to know who its regulars are.

Four more fields matter for business customers:

• VAT number — their tax registration number.
• CR number — their commercial registration number.
• Address — used on tax invoices.
• Credit limit — how much you are willing to let them run up.

The VAT number changes the invoice type

This is the single most important thing on this page.

When a customer with a VAT number is attached to a ticket, that sale is issued as a standard tax invoice. Without one, it is a simplified tax invoice. The app decides this on its own, using nothing but the customer record.

That has real consequences under ZATCA Phase 2. Standard tax invoices must be cleared by ZATCA before they can be issued, so the printing of one waits for clearance to come back. Simplified invoices are signed and reported afterwards, so they never hold up the queue.

The practical advice: only put a VAT number on a customer if they genuinely need tax invoices. Adding one to a walk-in regular who just wants a loyalty record will slow that customer’s checkout down for no benefit.

Attaching a customer to a sale

At the checkout, assign the customer before taking payment. The receipt then carries their details, and the sale is attached to them in the Documents list.

If you forget, you cannot retrofit a customer onto a completed invoice. You would have to void it and ring it up again, which is exactly the kind of thing the audit log is there to record. It is worth training staff to ask before the payment step, not after.

Credit limits

A credit limit records how much credit you have agreed to extend. It is a control you set on the record; there is no separate accounts-receivable ledger in the app today, so reconciling what a credit customer actually owes is still your own bookkeeping.

Suppliers

Suppliers live on their own tab with the same kind of contact fields. They are a contact book rather than a purchasing system — there is no purchase order workflow yet, so goods arriving are recorded as Purchase adjustments on the Stock screen.

Keeping the list clean

A customer list full of duplicates is worse than no list, because staff stop trusting it and start creating yet another record. Search before adding, and settle on one convention for phone numbers so that searching by number actually finds people.