Customer database template
The reference list, not the sales tracker. One row per customer, a customer code, contact details, and nothing that changes daily. This is the table your other tables lean on.
What's in the template
- Customer code: as text. This is what your other tables refer to, rather than the name, which gets spelled three ways.
- Name, Type (individual, company, nonprofit, public sector).
- Typed Email, Phone, Address, City.
- Account manager, Customer since, Active.
The filters that do the work
The template arrives with its typed columns. Each filter below takes two clicks on the grid, and it remembers your setup between visits.
- Active: alphabetical. This is the setup to keep, and it prevents most mis-entries against a former customer.
- By type and By city: useful for a route or a targeted mailing.
- With no filter, the whole list, inactive included.
Why not a spreadsheet for this
- Duplicates are the number-one problem in a customer file. A short customer code, sorted at the top of the table, makes a duplicate obvious at once: two neighbouring rows on the same code stand out, where "Acme Ltd" and "Acme Ltd." file in two different places and never meet.
- Everyone needs to read the file; nobody should be able to break it. In a spreadsheet, anyone who can read can also delete a row. Here viewers are free and can't overwrite anything.
- A reference list read by another tool has to be stable. The day someone inserts a column, everything that read column D reads column E, with no error shown. A table has named fields.
Your exports stay in Google Sheets. Mail merge, counts, labels: the table feeds your sheet and you keep working the way you already do.
FAQ
How do I de-duplicate my current file before importing? Import first, then sort by customer code: duplicates land side by side and clear in one pass.
Do I need a customer code if I only have twenty customers? Yes, and especially at twenty. That's when the convention is easy to hold; at two hundred it's too late.
Can I link my orders to this list? Use the same customer code in the order tracking template. The match is on the code, and you type it on both sides: the product doesn't join two tables together yet.
This template is one of the Rowbase templates. If you're still weighing whether to leave your sheet, read the six limits of a Sheet used as a database instead.