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Managing Clients With Pianos In 2+ Locations
Managing Clients With Pianos In 2+ Locations

How to set up, service, and invoice clients with multiple locations.

Timothy Barnes avatar
Written by Timothy Barnes
Updated over a week ago

Churches, schools, and arts organizations often have a central office that manages multiple pianos dispersed across different campuses & locations; or in some situations this might be a residential customer who has a piano at two different residences.


Central Billing Office

For corporate customers with a central billing office we recommend creating one customer record for the Company / Central Billing Office. The primary billing contact at this location is the person you want to add to this Gazelle client as a contact record. If needed, you can also add secondary contacts on this record for anyone at this location who is going to interface with your company.

NOTE: The most common use case here is for service contracts with local school districts and service contracts with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Regional Stakes managing groups of Mormon Temples.


Offsite Locations With Pianos

For all offsite locations with pianos create a different customer record complete with:

  • The name of the specific school or church campus in the company field.

  • The primary contact person you interface with at this location,

  • (Optional) Secondary contact people like the onsite facilities maintenance staff who you interface with to gain access to the building.

  • All the pianos that are at this location,


For residential customers with vacation homes / multiple residences:

  • Use their name as the primary contact.

  • Use the 'Role' field under the contact to put something like 'Vacation Home' as a way to differentiate this record from their other record in Gazelle.

  • Include under this record all the piano(s) at this location,


Billing, Estimates, & Inventory Management

For Billing & Invoices

If this customer requires a single invoice for all campus / locations (or one invoice a month for all service provided in the past 30 days), then read Tips For Billing Piano Dealerships, School Districts, and Universities. Otherwise, create the invoice under the contact record in Gazelle that owns the piano and email individual invoices for each location using the Alternate Billing feature (as needed make the corporate central billing office the alternate contact for billing purposes).

For Estimates

Estimates in Gazelle have to be associated with the specific piano. After an estimate is converted to an invoice you can follow the steps above for sending it to the right person for payment.

For Inventory Management

In institutional settings it is imperative that you keep individual service histories tied to the specific piano(s) and track them by serial number, room number, or piano ID. We recommend carefully recording notes on a piano by piano basis.


Transferring Pianos Between Customers & Venues

If the piano you are servicing is a rental piano (temporarily on site at this location) or this venue regularly transfers pianos from one location to another then you will need to create separate customer records for each venue location and transfer the piano from one customer to another to preserve the service history.

NOTE: Transferring pianos from one client to another will leave a trail of inactive copies of the piano as it existed on the sending client's record. We recommend deleting these since they are not needed in this use case.


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