Each person who interacts with your cemetery should have a customer record. They might be a space owner, marker vendor, or even an interred pet.

Customer basics

Who is a customer?

A "customer" is anyone that has any dealings with your cemetery. A customer may have paid you for a space or services. A customer may also be an interred person, cemetery employee, vendor contact, next-of-kin, and so on. If your cemetery allows pet burials, a customer might even be a dog!

Anyone you want to be able to track names, address, contact information, veteran information, living or deceased status, etc. should be entered as a "customer" of your cemetery.

What is a customer record?

When you save a customer in CIMS, it creates a customer record. Ideally, we want a 1:1 ratio of one customer record per customer. This way, we can show the same person's activity with a cemetery over time; we can show when they purchased a space, when they authorized a burial, when they were in turn interred, and so on. When a mistake is made and a customer ends up with multiple customer records, you can merge records (see below).

What about married couples?

For couples, each partner should have their own customer record, for a total of 2 records per couple.

Creating a customer record

There are 2 main ways to create a customer record:

From the Search tab
- Open the left-hand flyout and click on the "Search" tab. Choose the type "Customers". Click on the green "New customer" button.
From

Searching for customers

Searching for customers can easily be done in the left-hand flyout, where we have a tab dedicated to searching not just for customers, but also for deeds, spaces, and more. See the Search page for more information.

Merging customer records

Sometimes, mistakes happen and one customer may end up with multiple customer records. Ideally, we want every customer to only have one customer record. To solve this problem, we need to merge customer records.

To merge 2 customer records:

Coming soon!

If you have a customer with many customer records, repeat the above steps as necessary.

Customer contacts

Coming soon!

Outdated documentation below

Add

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alt text

To add a new customer click the green "Add New" button underneath the Search Type box. A popup will appear, fill out the information; First and Last names are required, all others are optional but are handy to have for searching and reports. Don't forget to scroll down as there is lots customer information that can be set. Also you can upload customer images by clicking on the blue "New Images" button in the new customer and then either dragging images to the upload area, or clicking on the "Select files the upload" button (only .jpg, .jpeg, .png and .gif files are allowed), you can upload as many pictures as you want.

Adding customer during transactions (sale/burial)

Adding Customers can also be done when changing the owner/co-owner of a space, or entering the interred's name on a burial. When you are doing either of those transactions it is best to start typing in the person's last name. When you do a list will appear under the input show all current customers that match that name. If the person is not in the list click the "Add New" link at the top of the list and a Add New Customer popup just like this one will appear. If you know that the customer doesn't exist in your database you can also click the '+' button. Although it is always best to search by last name before to avoid creating multiple customer records for the same person. Add New Customer Button

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Add New Customer After Search

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Customer Information window

Update

To update a customers just click on any of the fields you wish to change and enter the new information. When you are done click the green "Update" button at the bottom (you may need to scroll down to see it depending on your screen size).

Remove

To remove a customer:

Open that Customer's information page of the customer you want to remove
Click on the red "Delete" button at the bottom of the Customer's Information page.
1. Answer yes to the confirmation popup
2. After the customers has been deleted you will be sent back to teh main Customers page.

Merge

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merging customers

To Merge customers is to have one customer overwrite another (effectively deleting the second customer, while at the same time having the first customer take his/her place);

Open the customer information page for the customer you want to keep.
Click the blue "Merge" button at the bottom of the page (you may need to scroll to see this)
1. A customer search screen will open
  1. Search for the customer you want to be overwritten
  2. Click on the row the corresponds to the customer you want overwritten
  3. A merge customer screen will open and you will be able to choose what information you want to keep from each customer record
  4. Click the green Merge button in the bottom right of the screen and select 'ok' on the confirmation pop up on top.

The customer merge window will close and the Customer search Information page will reload.

IF both the first and second customers are interred (buried) then the merge will not occur as this will result in the first customer being interred in more than one place.

Add Contact

To add a contact (such as a Next Of Kin):

Open the Customer Information screen
Click on the "Contact" tab just under the Customer's Name in the upper left
Click on the blue "Add Contact" button
1. the customer search window will appear
  1. search for an existing customer
  2. click the green "Add New" button to add a new customer as the contact
2. choose a relationship of the chosen/created customer to the original customer
3. click the green "Save" buttonin the Relationship popup
  1. the contact information will appear in the list of contacts
repeat step 3 for additional contacts OR click "Close" on the customer search popup.

Remove Contact

click the red trashcan icon to the right of the contact you wish to remove.

Customers

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