How to Deactivate a Customer in EDGEBIC

To deactivate a customer in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, open the Customers tab, select the customer, click Edit, uncheck Is Active, and click Update. The record stays in the database with all of its history intact. What changes is visibility: the customer stops appearing in the pickers used to create new quotes and orders.

This is the right way to retire an account. Deleting a customer that has quotes or orders attached to it is not what you want, because the history is what tells you what you sold, at what price, and how it went.

Before You Start

• Confirm you actually want retirement rather than a correction. If the customer is still trading and only their contact details changed, edit the record instead: see how to add a customer for the field set.
• Pull any history you will need to filter by first. The customer filter dropdowns list active customers only, so it is easier to run a filtered report before deactivating than after.
• Check for open work. Quotes still in draft and manufacturing orders still in progress will continue to run, but you should know they exist before you make the customer harder to find.

Deactivating the Customer

1. Open the Customers tab.
2. Select the customer in the grid. If the list is long, type part of the name into the filter row above the Name column to narrow it down.
3. Click Edit to open the customer record.
4. Uncheck Is Active.
5. Click Update.

The change takes effect immediately. The customer no longer appears in the active customer list that feeds the quote and order pickers.

What Changes and What Does Not

The pattern is consistent with the rest of the product: deactivation governs what you can pick going forward, never what already happened. The same idea applies to products, work centers, shifts, and users.

How to Check It Worked

Open the quote dialog and drop down the customer list. The deactivated customer should not appear. That single check confirms the flag saved, because the picker reads from the active customer list.

Then open one of the customer's existing quotes and confirm the customer name still displays on it. That is the other half of the result, and it is the half people worry about.

One thing to expect on those existing quotes: the customer name shows correctly, but if you open the customer dropdown on that quote, the deactivated customer will not be selectable, because the dropdown filters to active customers. The quote is fine. You simply cannot re-pick a customer you have retired without reactivating them first.

Finding an Inactive Customer Later

Deactivation makes a customer harder to reach, which is the point, so it helps to know the two routes back.

To edit or reactivate the record, go to the Customers screen. The full list is loaded there, so a deactivated customer is still visible in the grid, and typing part of their name into the filter row above the Name column narrows the list quickly. Click Edit, check Is Active, click Update, and they are back in the pickers.

To find their old work, remember that the customer filter dropdowns list active customers only. You cannot pick a retired customer as a filter value, so clear the customer filter instead and locate the quotes or orders by another column such as quote number, job number, or date. Nothing is hidden, it just stops being one click away.

A Quick Worked Example

A fabricator has 140 customers in the system, of which about 30 have not ordered in five years. The quote picker has become a scrolling exercise and two duplicate records have already been created by people who gave up scrolling and typed a new name.

The planner runs the on-time delivery report filtered to each dormant account first, exports the results for the sales file, and only then goes through the Customers tab deactivating them one at a time: select, Edit, uncheck Is Active, Update. Twelve seconds each.

The picker drops from 140 names to 110. Every historical quote and order for those 30 accounts is still queryable, still shows the right customer name, and still counts in the delivery statistics. When one of them calls back the following spring, reactivating takes the same three clicks in reverse.

Common Mistakes

Deleting instead of deactivating. Deletion is not the tidy version of deactivation. A customer with quotes and orders behind them should be deactivated, because the history is the point.

Deactivating before pulling the history. The customer filter dropdown lists active customers only. Run the reports you need first, then retire the record.

Assuming in-progress work stops. It does not. An order already on the schedule for a deactivated customer keeps running and keeps its link. If you actually want the work stopped, that is a separate action: see how to cancel a manufacturing order.

Creating a duplicate because the original was invisible. If somebody cannot find a customer they expect to exist, check the inactive records before adding a new one. Two records for the same account split the history and are far harder to fix later than they are to avoid.

Next Steps

For the master data around this record, see how to set a customer credit limit and how to view a customer's order history. The same retirement pattern applied to items is how to deactivate a product without losing history.

For the wider picture of how customers relate to departments and orders, see EDGEBIC customers and departments explained. For the full task library, see the EDGEBIC how-to hub, and for the platform overview, EDGEBIC.