Supplier and customers are defined in Sage Financials in more than one object, and this caused some serious problems with the Account page. The good news is Sage brought in a new feature, without any mention of it in the release notes that I can see, to make this work properly.
What is the Problem?
To understand the problem you need to know how the Supplier & Customer data is structured:
Account
This is a standard Salesforce object and contains information such as:
- Account Name
- Address
- Website
Contact
This is another standard Salesforce object and every contact is linked to an Account in Salesforce. This contains information such as:
- First Name, Last Name
- Job title
- Email address
Dimension Tag
This is a Sage Financials object and this is what defines an Account as a supplier or customer. A supplier is linked to a ‘Supplier’ Tag and a customer to a ‘Customer’ Tag. If you are using multi-company, each Company has its own ‘Supplier’ and ‘Customer’ Tag. As well as defining suppliers & customers the Tag holds important information:
- Default Tax Treatment (used as the default when adding invoices)
- Contact (used as the default when adding Invoices and used for Customer Statements)
To view this information, click on the ‘Related’ tab in the Account page and scroll down to ‘Dimension Tag’ where you can click on the Name:
This opens the Dimension Tag and scroll down on the r/h side to see the data:
Related Dimension Tag
Linked to the ‘Customer’ and ‘Supplier’ Tags are ‘Related Tags’ which hold data such as:
- Payment Terms
When you create an invoice, it will default to these Payment Terms.
Bank Accounts
Also linked to ‘Customer’ and ‘Supplier’ Tags are ‘Bank Accounts’. And these record contain the details used when creating the BACS payment feed.
And the problem is…
The problem is the new Account layout page combines data from
- Account
- Supplier/Customer Tag (eg: Tax Treatment)
- Related Tag (eg: Payment Terms)
- Bank Account (eg IBAN)
So if you have an Account which is BOTH customer and supplier, or an Account which is a supplier to multiple companies, what data is it displaying???
And similarly with the Account Health panel – which data is it displaying???
What is the secret new feature?
At the top of the Account page you will see two 
icons:
If you click on these you can control which related data is displayed – eg: Customer or Supplier
Happy days!
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