Back in Round 13 we set up a vendor and counted the windows it took. Today we cross the aisle to the sales side. A new customer just signed, sales wants them in the system today, and the order is already waiting (Round 15 covered what happens next). How fast can you get from “new customer” to “ready to sell”?
Both systems can do this well. But they ask different amounts of your attention while you do it.
How You Do It in Dynamics GP
Step 1: Build your customer classes first. GP’s best setup habit lives in the Customer Class Setup window (Tools > Setup > Sales > Customer Class). Per Microsoft’s Receivables Management documentation, classes group similar customers — retail, wholesale, government — and hold defaults: payment terms, credit limits, salesperson, price level, history options, and posting accounts. Set up your first class carefully and mark it as the default, because later classes copy from it.
Step 2: Open Customer Maintenance. Cards > Sales > Customer. Enter the customer ID (your naming convention matters — IDs are forever), name, class ID, and the main address. Assigning the class pulls in all those defaults, which is genuinely GP at its best.
Step 3: Keep going — more windows. The main card is just the front door. Additional addresses (bill-to, ship-to, statement-to) live in Customer Address Maintenance. Credit limits, finance charges, and payment terms details sit behind the Options button in a separate Customer Maintenance Options window. Posting accounts get their own Accounts window. A complete customer usually means a tour through three or four windows — the same pattern we counted on the vendor side in Round 13.
Step 4: Maintain the class over time. When your payment terms policy changes, you update the class and “roll down” the change to every customer in it. Powerful — but it’s an all-or-nothing push you want to test carefully, because it overwrites what’s on the cards.
How You Do It in Business Central
Step 1: Open Customers, choose New. That’s the whole navigation. Per Microsoft’s register new customers guide, if you have one customer template, BC opens a new Customer Card with the template’s fields already filled. If you have several — retail, wholesale, export — BC asks which one to apply, then fills the card.
Step 2: Fill in what’s left. Name, address, contact, email. Everything else — payment terms, posting groups, price settings, even default dimensions (remember Round 5) — arrived with the template. One page, organized in FastTabs you scroll, not windows you hunt for. Hover over any field and BC explains what it does.
Step 3: Make templates from real customers. Here’s the part GP admins will envy. Set up one customer exactly the way you like, choose Save as Template, and BC turns that card into the starting point for future customers — dimensions included. No separate setup module, no class-building session before you can begin. Your best customer record becomes your template.
Step 4: Update existing customers with Apply Template. Policy changed? Select one customer — or a filtered list of them — and use Apply Template to apply the new defaults. It’s the same idea as GP’s roll-down, but you choose exactly who gets it, right from the customer list.
Bonus: start from a contact. If the customer began life as a prospect in BC’s contact list, you create the customer directly from the contact card. No retyping the relationship you already recorded.
Side by Side
| Dynamics GP | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| Where setup starts | Customer Class Setup, then Customer Maintenance | Customers > New |
| Defaults come from | Customer classes (built in a setup window) | Templates (saved from any real customer card) |
| Windows to complete a customer | Card + Options + Accounts + Addresses | One Customer Card with FastTabs |
| Creating a template | Class setup session, admin territory | Save as Template on any card |
| Pushing changes later | Class roll-down, all-or-nothing | Apply Template to selected customers |
| Default dimensions/segments | Not part of the class | Included in the template |
| From prospect to customer | Retype into Customer Maintenance | Create customer from contact |
| Field help | Manuals and muscle memory | Hover tooltips on every field |
Why BC Comes Out Ahead
GP’s customer classes were a great idea, and they still are — the concept literally lives on in BC’s templates. The difference is where the work sits. GP puts it up front and in admin territory: build classes in a setup window, then walk each new customer through three or four maintenance windows. BC puts it in the flow of work: any well-built customer card becomes a template in one click, new customers start from it automatically, and updates go exactly to the customers you pick.
For the person who enters one new customer a month, BC means fewer windows and fewer chances to miss a field. For the admin who owns the standards, it means the standards live in something you can see — a real card — instead of a setup window nobody visits.
Thinking About the Switch?
Aisling Dynamics helps GP teams keep their classes and customer records clean, and helps companies move to Business Central when setup should be a template, not a project. If onboarding a customer takes longer than winning one, meet our team, browse the GP vs. BC hub, or contact us at (251) 293-0555.
Come back tomorrow for Round 22: cash receipts — GP’s Cash Receipts Entry vs. BC’s Cash Receipt Journals, and what it takes to apply a payment.