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Recently I have noticed a few posts on the community and heard feedback related to the changes we made to how customers and transactions handle addresses and contacts in Peachtree 2010. I thought it might be useful to explain the changes and detail the best way to use the new Contacts fields to reduce the impact on your daily work while getting the benefits from the feature. First let me start by explaining why we introduced the new Contacts capabilities.
Over the last several years we’ve received numerous requests for changes to the way we handle address and contact information. We’ve also viewed first hand in our customer visits how existing and new users struggle with the limitations of our existing system. Many customers needed to show an “attention” line on invoices, to track shipping instructions for each address, to have unlimited addresses, to track names and phone numbers for their customers or vendors and for each of their locations, to be able to change the bill-to or remit-to addresses on transactions, and more. In addition, new users and new customers struggled to understand the meaning of a Ship To or Remit To Address 1, when in everyday terms they think of John’s or Jane’s phone number and Citibank’s Billing Department or Citibank’s Complaints Department. Taken individually, these are easy changes to understand, but together these are changes with far reaching implications in the program and for daily use of the program. That is why with Peachtree 2010 we’ve taken just the first step in trying to address our customers’ needs for tracking contact and address information.
That step was to add the new Multiple Contacts feature to Customers and AR transactions. In this feature we took the ”recipient” field from the addresses, expanded it, and renamed it to “Contacts” to convey the expanded functionality. This allowed us to address several of our customer requests like attaching phone numbers, email addresses, shipping notes, and more to this revamped “recipient” field. We also allow you to track virtually unlimited contacts for each of your 20 shipping addresses and your billing address. But we had a challenge…
This change caused a problem with how Peachtree worked previously. The single recipient field that was previously on an address can’t accommodate the multiple recipients (contacts) you can now add, so we had to remove the “recipient” field from addresses. With no recipient field directly on the addresses now, it means you can’t just add an address on the Address tab and use it on an invoice. This is because you don’t ship to 1700 North Brown Rd. You ship to Sage at 1700 North Brown Rd, or Joe Smith or Accounts Payable at 1700 North Brown. Without a recipient or contact, the address is incomplete. This might seem strange for long time Peachtree users who are used to the Ship To Address 1 format. But the new system is much more in keeping with the way things like address books and the Yellow or White Pages are set up. In those, you would never look up or create an entry for 1700 North Brown or Ship to 1. Entries are almost always based on the most important part of the address: the contact, whether that be a person, company, or department.
So how should you be entering addresses so you can use them now? Here is the quickest way:
- Open your customer and go to the Contacts tab.
- Click New Contact.
- Whatever you would have previously put into the recipient field of the address, type it into the Company Name field.
- Click New Address and enter the new address information.
- Click OK and Save the customer.
This post lists only the quickest way to enter contacts. If you want more information on how to use contacts for maintaining your Bill To contact, setting up defaults, or more, check out the What’s New page in Help or the Contacts (Maintain Customers/Prospects) topic in the Help file itself. You can also contact me or post questions on our community where fellow Peachtree users, Peachtree partners, and Sage employees will be glad to give advice.
Jared Smith
Product Marketing & Management
