How to Handle New Property Owners or Changes in Leaseholders
This topic covers how and when to use the “Copy Customer:Job” feature to deal with builders who sells homes, homeowners who sell their houses, landlords that lease a property to different tenants, commercial property changing ownership, and similar scenarios relating to changes of property ownership.
Possible Scenarios This Covers
These are just a few of many scenarios that this topic covers.
- Your customer is a homeowner. You have been doing work on their house. You have invoices, work orders, equipment, notes, records, and financial history. They sell the house, move out, and someone else buys the home. You are now working for the new owner of the house. You want to be able to see all of the equipment history for that house, regardless of who owned it at that time.
- Your customer is a builder. They could build residential homes, offices, or anything else like that. Your enter the builder into Total Office Manager as a parent. Your company performs HVAC, electrical, plumbing, or any other service for that structure for that builder. Your enter those jobs as children under that parent. Your company has entered work orders, sales leads, estimates, invoices, equipment, notes, records, and financial history for that job under that property (the child). The builders sells the property to someone else. You now start working for the new owner. You want to be able to see all of the equipment history for the equipment in that property, even when the builder still owned it.
- Your customer is a commercial property owner. These properties may be located at an office building, strip mall, or other space. Your enter the property owner into Total Office Manager as a parent. Your company performs HVAC, electrical, plumbing, or any other services for the property owner. Your work might be for many different suite numbers within a property. Your enter those suite numbers as children under the parent (the property). The property owner sell the builder and you start working for new owner.
Example of a Home Sale
Consider the first example above. It was related to a homeowner selling their house to someone else.
Original Owner
John Doe
8877 Bourgade Street
Lenexa KS 66219
New Owner
Nancy Johnson
8877 Bourgade Street
Lenexa KS 66219
Generally, you would NEVER change the name of the customer or perform a full merge. Here is the best practice to handle a situation where your customer moves.
From the Customer:Job list, locate and right click on the customer. Copy the customer and click yes when asked about moving their equipment. Financial history should stay with the original owner, since the transactions belong to them according to any accounting system. In the new customer record, enter a note as to what and why you copied the customer. Your notes should include the original customer’s name and other details as needed. Finally, then inactivate the original owner. If you want to look at history for the original owner, it will always be there for you.
Q: Why Not Perform a Full Merge (merge the customer records)?
A: An accountant would never recommend changing the customer on an invoice or other financial transactions, since you would never do that with a paper accounting system (as it is not even possible with a paper system). That is what merging financial records does. The merge feature is most often used to remove accidental duplicates.
