Primary and Sub Customer

Primary and Sub-Customers, What’s the Difference?

A primary customer is the direct recipient of a product or service, the entity with whom a business has a formal, transactional relationship (e.g., they receive invoices, sign contracts). They are the immediate point of sale or service delivery.

A sub-customer, on the other hand, is the ultimate end-user or beneficiary of that product or service, even if they don’t have a direct transactional relationship with the originating business. Their needs and experiences are crucial because their satisfaction often drives the primary customer’s ongoing demand.

Why Use Primary & Sub-Customers?

Recognizing primary and sub-customers is vital for any business because it allows for a dual-layered strategic approach. Understanding your primary customers enables you to build strong, direct business relationships, optimize your sales channels, and manage the immediate flow of goods or services.

Simultaneously, focusing on the sub-customers provides crucial insights into the ultimate demand, product efficacy, and long-term market trends, ensuring that what you offer is truly valuable and desired. This comprehensive perspective leads to more effective product development, targeted marketing, improved overall satisfaction across the entire value chain, and ultimately, sustained business growth.

The following tutorial will walk you through the process of creating both primary and sub-customers in the ServiceWorks software:

How to Setup Primary Customer

If you plan on setting a previously created customer as a primary customer, you can skip this section and move on to setting up your sub-customers.

To begin, first you’ll need to create a primary customer. This can be done 1 of 2 ways:

Method 1: The Customer Menu

Login to ServiceWorks and hover over the Customer tab in the toolbar, then select Customers from the dropdown menu.

Once in the customer menu, click the New button in the upper right corner

Method 2: The New Customer Button

Alternatively, you can also create a new customer by clicking the +Add New tab on the toolbar and selecting New Customer

Once you’ve reached the customer edit menu using either method, enter the customers information within the fields below. Click Save when your finished to continue.

How to Setup Sub-Customer

To create a sub-customer, you’ll need to repeat the same customer creation steps from above (via the customer menu or the new job button) or open up a previously existing customer account.

Once finished with entering the customers information (or pulling up an existing customer’s info), you will need to click the Is Sub-Customer checkbox within the Customer Details section

Upon doing so, two new fields will appear in the Customer Details section, Parent Customer and “Bill with Parent/Self”

In the Parent Customer field, enter the name of the customer you want to be designated as the Primary customer. Their information should begin to auto-populate after the first 3 characters are entered in the field.

And in the field beside it you can determine which of the parties is responsible for the billing:

Bill with Self – Selecting this option will set the responsibility for paying invoices upon the subcustomer
Bill with Parent – Selecting this option will set the billing responsibility to the parent, or primary customer.

Upon making this selection, whichever party responsible for the invoice will have their address shown in the billing portion of the edit customer page

View the Primary and Sub Customer Menu

Navigate to Customer-> primary Customer and you will see all the Primary customers with or without sub customers. The grid will show how many sub customers these primary ones have.

Click on the show sub customer from the three-dot link and you will land on the sub customer list page. You can edit, view and see the history of these sub customers from the three-dot menu. You can also filter the sub customer by the product they have.