NAV in the past and BC now is missing a simple and easy way to create and use a Customer which is not a company or an organization. A SMB solution deals not only with Company Customers but also Private Persons who do not belong to or own a Company.

There are competitive ERP systems in the market which provide this feature of a private person as a customer and different handling on the user interface depending whether the customer is of type company or a private person.

This idea is to have a possibility in Business Central to create a Private Person as a Customer from a Customer Template with / without a linked Person Contact.

Reasons why the current Company Customer cannot be used like a Person Customer

The Company Customer just has a Name field, a private person would like to be addressed in communication with First Name / Last Name in addition to the Address Salutation and the title. On the Customer Card it is not possible to enter the above mentioned fields.

The Order of the First Name, Last Name on the invoices and other documents print out should be flexible to choose between First Name, Last Name or both, with just a name field on the Customer Card, this requirement cannot be fulfilled and makes it mandatory to work with a linked Contact of type Person.

Customer of type Company created by the end user,
Contact of type Company created by the application if the Business Relation Code is set in Setup,
Contact of type Person that needs to be additionally created to manage the First Name, Last Name, Address Salutation.

Modifying the details on the Customer don’t get updated or synchronized with the linked Contact makes it a data quality nightmare.

This is quite an overhead to have three entities for a single sale transaction in today's application.

The relationship between the Contact for CRM Purposes and to Customer for Sales Purposes is not easy to be explained and made understood to end users in the Small Business Segment, where the Sale is a quick one off transaction or a seasonal transaction and does not follow lengthy Sales Cycles to convert from Leads, Contact, Quote, Customer and Order, hence speed of creating master data, capture data required for business purposes and printing the invoice is key.

The Small Business Segment mostly have two or three persons covering all areas of the business from Purchase, Sales, Inventory, CRM, Service etc working with the application and the rest of the workforce being on the field instead of having a dedicated User for each role, here efficiency in creating master data and processing transactions is the key.

Features expected in the application for such a Private Person as Customer
- Ability to have the contact related fields on the customer card - First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Address Salutation, Title, Phone No, Email Addresses.
- For small businesses to have all customer related information on customer entity and not customer + contact.
- Possibility to switch easily from current Contact linked to a Company Customer to an individual Customer with Contact Type Person with or without linked Contact
- Consent Management on the Customer Entity for Data Privacy Purposes that the business can contact