Terminating and Removing Clients / Customers

It is a normal part of business to lose a customer, whether they move, sell, move into, etc. their property. Terminating them and removing them from your system is simple, but it involves a few steps to address schedules, etc.

HWIT automates the process of terminating a client. Basically, the steps that will be performed include:

1. Verify that the Customer does not have an open balance and QB business rules are satisfied

2. Remove any existing Work Orders that have not been completed (Completed WOs will remain in your history)

3. Remove any Series for the Customer

Note that with QuickBooks Desktop, HWIT cannot fully perform all of the QB business rules checks. As a result, after the process is complete and your sync has run, you should make sure that the Customer is Inactive in your QuickBooks Desktop system.

To terminate the customer, simply go to their record on the Customer Screen, and click Terminate Customer on the “Other” button as shown below.

The system will guide you from there. After the Customer is made inactive you will be returned to the Customer List screen.

The below instructions are from previous versions but will outline the process to terminate a customer that is automated above. They remain here as a reference.

Step 1: Delete their Series

Go to the Work Order screen and go into the client’s Series work order. You can delete the Series, as well as any future Occurrences, easily by pressing the Delete button when you have the Series open.

The system will protect you from deleting Occurrences that may have been missed or still need to be billed. If you are told that the Series cannot be deleted it is most likely that you have Work Order Occurrences dated prior to today that have not been Completed or Cancelled. If the work was performed, they should be “Completed” so that they can be invoiced. You cannot delete the Series until you have created the invoice for those Work Orders.

Any other Work Orders that are in a “Not Started” status, dated prior to the current date, should be changed to Cancelled. You will then be able to delete the Series using the Delete button on the screen.

Step 2: Complete the financial items

A few things to review:

• Make sure all work orders have been invoiced
• Make sure that all invoices have been paid
• Make sure that all payments have been entered into the system
• If you need to refund Prepayment Balances, do that now using this guide.

Step 3: Make the Customer Inactive

Finally, you can make the customer “Inactive” in QuickBooks. This step needs to be done in your QuickBooks system as QuickBooks needs to validate and make sure that all financial items have been completed and processed before making the customer inactive.

Note that this isn’t a “Delete” of the customer, but rather flags them as inactive so that they no longer appear on your customer lists. It is necessary to keep them on file so that all of the historical transactions, like invoices, remain in the system and your books will continue to be in balance.

To make the customer inactive, simple go to the Customer screen in QuickBooks and bring up the customer information, like in the screenshot below. Click on the “Make Inactive” button.

That’s it -- the schedule has been updated and the customer will no longer appear in your lists, dropdowns, etc. Should they ever re-hire you, you can turn them back into an “Active” customer by going to the Customer edit screen and click the button “Make Active”.