How to: Creating customers centrally and pushing them to POS

Further reading
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 for Developers [AX 2012] SDK Download

Viewing customers and details

Customers can be viewed or modified through the AX accounts receivable area page. The path is Accounts Receivable Common Customers All customers

Once launched, the customers list look like this:

The screenshot above shows some existing customers and the details for the highlighted customer can be found at the bottom of the form. More details can be viewed by double clicking on a particular customer and opening the customer form which looks like this:

A customer can be edited by clicking on the Edit button as shown in the form above, making the required changes and closing the customer form.

Creating a new customer

A new customer can be created by opening a blank customer form from the customers list form. See image below for how to open a blank customer form:

Once launched, the new customer form looks like this:

Some of the various fields are explained below: 1) Customer Account: this field is not editable and is automatically generated. 2) Record type: this is a selection indicating if the customer is a person or an organization. The form changes the inputs required based on the value of this field. 3) Customer group: this is again grouping that is present to help in customer classification at a broader level for example: retail or wholesale. 4) There is other specific information about a customer like his sales tax group, terms of payment etc. 5) The address and contact information fields are pretty self-explanatory. After filling in the required details, press the Save and close button on the form. That will save the new customer in AX and close the form. You should be able to see the new customer in the customer list form now.

Pushing a new customer from AX to POS

A critical step is needed after creating a customer in AX to be able to send it across to POS and that is setting the address book for the customer to match the one used by POS so that the information can be

transferred. To set the address book of a customer, open the customer for editing and change the address book to RetailCust. See the image below on how to do that.

Press the close button to save the changes in the customer form. The customer is now associated with the POS address book. The next step is to create actions from pre actions and run the A-1010 job in AX to replicate those customers to the POS DB. To do that: 1) Select create actions from Retail Periodic Data distribution create actions. A new form opens up which looks like this:

Press the ok button on the form. 2) Open the distribution schedule from Retail Periodic Data distribution Distribution schedule. A new form opens up which looks like this:

3) Select the A-1010 (customers) job from the left side of the form and press the Run directly button on the toolbar of the form. Press Yes when the confirmation dialog box pops up.

When the A-1010 job finishes successfully, all the new customers in AX which have their address book correctly set up will get replicated to the POS db. Customers can also be created and edited through POS and there is a separate how-to document for that.