Customer Details

When viewing a subscription in Advanced Billing, shipping information and other contact information can be viewed in the Customer Details.

The information in Customer Details is derived from the customer’s entry in Advanced Billing. Customer information is stored in a separate tab in the Advanced Billing application. Please note the signifigant differences in the subscriptions versus customer tabs.

Let’s use the following as an example:

• When a subscription is created via a Public Signup Page/POST to subscriptions.json, a subscription entry is created.
• Additionally, a corresponding customer entry is created in Advanced Billing that houses data addressed in this reference page.

Relationship between Subscription and Customer Data

As mentioned above, there is a relationship between the subscription entry and the customer entry. The subscription entry uses the data stored in the customer entry to populate the following information:

• Customer details
• Shipping address
• Payment profiles

To put this another way, several pieces of information are stored as part of the customer, as opposed to the subscription. This information is viewable in the customer details tab in the subscription entry. Advanced Billing encourages you to use one customer entry, shared by many subscriptions. This reduces the amount of duplication in your account.

For example:

• Person A signs up for a subscription with Advanced Billing (ID: 1)
• Person A has 1 subscription created (ID: 1) and 1 customer entry created (ID: 9)
• Person A signs up for a new subscription (ID: 11) within your site, with the customer (ID: 9)
• When you view the Customer entry for ID: 9, you’ll see both subscriptions 1 & 11

For more information on using existing customers to create subscriptions, please see the following article here.

If your workflow uses Public Signup Pages, each new signup with the same email address will create a new customer entry and corresponding subscription entry. Configure your field settings to allow the same email address to be used in multiple signups, by unchecking the box for "Unique".

Searching Customers

Advanced Billing provides a few methods to locate customers. Use the methods below to locate customers based on a few key pieces of criteria:

• Search Term

In the search term box, locate a customer using:

• Customer ID
• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Reference
• Organization/company name

Search Limitations

In the search term box you may not search by the following attributes:

• CC email
• Phone
• Address information (city, state, zip, etc)
• VAT
• Product

If you wish to search for a customer, such as phone or shipping address, we recommend you export the customer data and search by filtering the spreadsheet outside of Advanced Billing.

First Name

Specify the first name of the customer. This will be the first name noted on the subscription.

Last Name

Specify the last name of the customer.

Email

Specify the email address for your customer.

CC Emails

Add additional email addresses for your customer. Any CC emails included here will receive a copy of all associated communications for the subscription. Emails of this nature fall into the category of statements, receipts, cancellation confirmation and dunning notices.

At this time, a customer may have a maximum of 5 CC email addresses.

Any email addresses added to the cc field will not receive Billing Portal-related emails. This includes invitations, even once access to the Billing Portal has been enabled. For more information on the portal login flows, please read our documentation.

Organization / Company

Specify the name of company or organization of the customer.

Phone

Provide a phone number for a customer.

Reference ID

Specify a unique ID for a subscription. Please be aware the reference IDs are not case sensitive. Reference IDs must be unique across all your subscriptions; 2 customers may not share the same reference ID.

Shipping Address

Specify the street address for the customer.

Shipping Address 2

Specify any auxillary information regarding the customer.

Shipping Country

Specify the country for the customer. The entry for country must adhere to the ISO Standard for Country codes when submitted to Advanced Billing via API.

Shipping State

Specify the state for the customer. The entry for state must adhere to the ISO Standard for State codes when submitted to Advanced Billing via API.

Shipping Zip Code

Specify the zip code for the customer.

Verified for ACH/eCheck Payments

Verifying a customer for ACH allows them to enter their bank account information, which they can do via the Self-Service Page. ACH guidelines put the responsibility on you, the merchant, to know your customer well enough to trust them to enter valid bank account info. Therefore, we recommend that you enable ACH payments only for customers with whom you have some trust.

Tax Exempt

Setting the customer as tax exempt will result in no taxes being assessed on any of their subscriptions. For more information on tax exempt subscriptions, please view our documentation

VAT Number

Enter a valid VAT number for a subscription. In order for a VAT number to be valid, please do not include the country code at the beginning of the VAT number.

For example:

If the true VAT number is SE1234567890, you will want to enter 1234567890 only. Leave off the country code in order for the VAT number to be accurate in Advanced Billing.

For more information on VAT taxes, please see our documentation here.

Maximum Length

The maximum length of each field within the customer object is 255 characters. The exception to this rule is the VAT field.

Custom Fields

We will show any associated custom fields for a customer and allow the editing of existing values or the deletion of the data:

From the “Select Field” dropdown you can add new data to existing custom fields for the customer. In addition you can create new customer custom fields by typing in a name of a custom field that doesn’t exist yet: