Customers

Overview

To automate your billing process, our billing system (Us at Zenskar :)) needs to understand who your customers are and the commercial terms (contracts) you have signed with them. Some of this information is already available in your software, such as your customer details and their usage of your product - we refer to this as metering.

First, we need to get your customer details onto Zenskar. This can be done on the customers page, where you can import and create customers and store their details, such as their address (for sales tax), contacts (for follow-up emails), and invoices.

There are two ways to create customers on Zenskar:

1. Manually adding customers.
2. Integrating APIs to add customers. To add customers this way, see customer APIs.

How to add customers on Zenskar?

To add a new customer, go to Customer > Add Customers.

Add New Customer

Here you have to provide the following details of the customer, apart from the basic information like customer information and address:

Customer details

You can view individual customer information from here, including their invoices, contracts, entitlements, payment status, and other details.

Credit history

Credit history lets you view the customer’s past debit/credit information of the contract. On Zenskar, credits can be given to customers for promotion & other reasons. Customers can issue these credits against their invoice, to reduce the amount of their purchases. Availing of these credits on past invoices can be seen on customers credit history. Debit is the amount the customer owes towards your organization.

Adjust balance

Sometimes users have a credit/debit balance associated with their account. You can add or subtract credits/debits for a customer from adjust balance. These credits can be given to a customer manually for promotional purposes, or when you refund a paid invoice by issuing credits to the user.

Custom Data

The Custom Data field allows you to add custom JSON data. (JSON is a simple way to exchange data between servers and the web. It is useful for storing and displaying data on web pages.)

For example, if the customer (company) you are billing has multiple users signed up for your product. This enables you to generate a single bill for multiple users from the same company.

An example of using a JSON field to store additional data might be in the context of a CRM. Let's say you want to store information about a customer's preferred method of communication and their time zone. You could add a JSON field to the customer's profile, like "additional_info": {"preferred_communication": "email", "timezone": "PST"} . This additional information could be useful for your team for creating better billing experience.

You can use the Custom Data field to store the following JSON:

{
  "users": [
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]"
  ]
}

This same concept can be used to combine other methods of charging customers, such as workspaces. Once saved, you can view customer details, invoices, contracts, etc., on the customer detail page.

Connectors

On Zenskar, importing customer data in real-time to other systems can be done using connectors. They can help you sync Zenskar customer data with third-party products, such as Stripe.

For example, if you want to collect payments via Stripe, you can use Zenskar's Stripe connector to create a customer on Stripe when you create a customer on Zenskar.

Go to Settings > Connectors to connect with 3rd party apps.

List of supported connectors:

Stripe -> Payments /CRM
Hubspot -> CRM/CPQ
Quickbooks -> Finance/ERP
Xero -> ERP
Zoho -> CRM/Finance

We are continuously adding third-party apps to our connectors list. Below are some of the connectors we will be releasing soon.

Salesforce -> CPQ
Netsuite -> Accounting
Rudderstack -> Usage Data
Segment(twilio) -> Usage Data