Customer Agreements: How a 360-degree view of customer information can fulfill orders faster and more accurately

Customer agreements are important for a number of obvious reasons. Overall, they provide a clear picture or details of what the company has agreed to deliver.  As an integral tool in Dynamics 365 Business Central, customer agreements not only empower your sales team, but they also enhance the level of customer service your company can provide its customers, while in turn, helping that customer gain a 360-degree view of their operations too.

In brief, this feature provides your team with the following:

1. A full list of agreements for customers and vendors.
2. An agreement card which stores all the required information about agreements.
3. Organization between agreements and dimensions, enabling use of current reports and dimension analyses.

Empowering your sales team

Here are just some of the ways in which customer agreements help the sales team in their day-to-day activities:

• Ability to understand what was agreed upon to ensure delivery of goods promised.
• Ability to reward top purchasers with discounts or incentives.
• Understanding inventory levels and production plans, which provides more accurate information to customers on what they can order and when it will be available.
• Accessibility of the information on any device, anywhere.
• Integration capability with Teams and Outlook. This allows the sales team to communicate with customers through those applications and the information automatically syncs to Business Central, providing the production team with up-to-date information on the status of orders.
• Allows sales orders to stream seamlessly from sales to finance.

Enhancing customer service

Customer agreements enhance customer service by providing easy access to real time information and history. For example, if there are questions or issues with an order, the customer service team has complete access to all client history, including what was ordered, how much the customer paid, when goods were shipped, when quality checks took place, etc.

Creating productive producers

Moreover, this also makes the producers job easier. For companies that are manufacturing products, the information from customer agreements allows them to plan their production more effectively, based on the customers’ requests. It provides the ability for planning and ensuring they have the right mix and level of inventory available. Another added benefit is that the software can also monitor or track future availability. So, if a customer wants something that’s not available right now the producer can better project and communicate when it will be available.

In the agribusiness industry, including cannabis, access to this information is especially valuable with business growing and moving so rapidly. Having concurrent access to a single source of truth means the information is more accurate and it’s no longer buried in spreadsheets or relying on “local knowledge.”

Customer agreements are a beneficial feature in Business Central that adds value and enables companies in the cannabis industry and manufacturing to work smarter and more efficiently. In case you are still not convinced, let’s review some of the components it offers that help companies in overall operations:

• Creating happier customers. Everyone is essentially on the same page. With this level of transparency and operating from a single source of truth guarantees a better client working relationship.
• Ability to predict future sales based on historical purchases. This information is specifically important to the finance and accounting function of your business and prevents each department from working in a vacuum. The interaction between each department creates a more collaborative environment.
• Understanding reports and analytics of what is coming from sales, what is in inventory, and what needs to be produced. The power of being able to piece together all the information for each phase is next to none.
• Greater foresight when it comes to forecast resource requirements.
• Loss prevention. With no lost orders or need to provide refunds (due to the higher level of accuracy) gives greater insights into every detail of an order/fulfillment.

If you’re currently using Business Central, or are interested in how this feature is set up in the system, you can read through the process here.

Final thoughts

The customer agreements function in Business Central was designed for companies that produce and sell a line of products to multiple customers. In the cannabis industry, tracking information on both products and customers is invaluable, especially when it comes meeting compliance requirements, such as state-specific laws and creating audit trails.

The complexities of the cannabis industry can be overwhelming but with the right business management solution your company can rise to the challenge with the information to make better organizational decisions. To learn more about Velosio’s agribusiness software, built on the power of Microsoft’s Business Central platform, contact us today.