Customer Item Lookup: Great Tool, but with a Few Limitations

Now that the Professional Services Tools Library is free, there are a number of tools that are now available to use. Customer Item Lookup is one of these tools that is very useful. This tool allows you to see what items a customer has purchased in the past. For each item they have purchased it will be listed by the last purchase date and the cost and quantity of that last purchase.

Sounds great, right? No more pulling up a SmartList in order to see what a customer has purchased in the past. You can do it right in the Sales Transaction Entry window, right as you are entering an Order or Invoice. But here is the first limitation; you can only pull up the Customer Item Lookup from a Sales Transaction Entry window. The second limitation: this lookup only lists the items that have been sold through SOP, so if you use Project Accounting this list will not include items that were billed out through project.

This is a great tool for anyone working directly with customers as they fill out orders or invoices. You are able to lookup what the customer has ordered in the past, and what price they paid, right as you are creating their current order or invoice. It saves time because it is available right from the Sales Transaction Entry window.

In order to use the Customer Item Lookup, you will need to have the Professional Services Tool Library installed. After that is done you will need to create the initial history for your customers. This is done in the Sales Order Processing Setup window. Once the initial data is created, each time you post an invoice transaction it will update the customer’s lookup data.

When you are in a Sales Transaction Entry window, there are two ways to open the Customer Item Lookup window. After you have entered the customer information, you can either click Additional > Historical Lookup or you can just key CTRL + H. Either of these methods will open the Customer Item Lookup window for this customer.