Customers vs Guests

The short answer is that whoever is paying the bill is the customer. 

For most smaller properties with full automation already implemented, this may not be an issue you ever encounter. 
For larger properties with group bookings and travel agencies among their customers, this is an important distinction. It is useful for all Booking Factory users to know the difference. 

Customer = Whoever pays the bill:

Your Customer list includes both Personal and Company profiles. Companies are identifiable with the office building icon. Personal profiles have no icon (except when looking them up in a booking). 

When you receive a booking from an OTA (Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb etc.), our system assumes the guest is paying regardless of whether the booking comes with a Virtual Card or payment at the end of the month from the OTA. In those cases, the customer = guest. 

If your customer is a company, you need to specify who the guest(s) are separately. If you do not, the booking will be populated with all caps "MISSING NAME". You can change this in the booking process or after the booking has been made. Even then, there is one very important thing to keep in mind. Keep reading.

Guest names in bookings: 

A very common mistake made when updating the guest info in both individual and group bookings, is that people seem to opt for the "Edit Guest" pen to update the name and information for the guest in each room. To their annoyance, they will fast find that this changes all the guests to the new name, credit card info etc. This is because you started off with one person booking all the rooms and essentially, you are just changing the details of that same person across all the rooms when, presumably, you wanted to establish a new guest profile.

The correct way of doing this, is to "Replace Guest" (arrows pointing left and right) for each room. That will give you a new guest with individual information to manipulate as you wish. This will also enable you to +Add Folio for each guest to add their own credit card and payment can be done separately. The guest names will appear on the dropdown menu when pressing the "Change Customer" edit pen in the Folio area.

For every guest with a folio, you will be able to add credit cards into their own vault. 

I hope that explains the differences and similarities between guests and customers for you. Please jump on the chat if you still have questions about any of this.