Company accounts
Understand B2B company records, multi-user accounts, and how to keep them tidy.
Flowtech's storefronts are B2B-first. Most customers aren't individuals — they're buyers at companies, and often several people at the same company share one trading relationship with you. Vendure has first-class support for this through Company accounts.
How customers and companies relate
- Each Customer in Vendure is a person with an email, name, and login.
- Each Company represents the organisation they work for.
- A company can have multiple customers associated with it — for example, five people from Acme Ltd all placing orders on the same Acme account.
- A customer belongs to one company at a time.
This means that when a customer calls asking about "our order", you might need to look at orders across all the other users on their company account, not just their own.
Finding a company
- In the sidebar, open a Customer record.
- Scroll to the Company section on the customer form.
- You'll see the company name, account number, VAT number, and registration number (depending on what's been captured).
If you want to see all users on the same company, note the company name or account number, then use the Customers list and filter by that company.
Key company fields
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Company Name | The trading name — used on invoices and emails. |
| Account Number | A unique reference, usually matching your back-office ERP. Automatically assigned by the platform on new customers. |
| VAT Number | The EU/UK VAT registration number. Used for tax handling on B2B orders. |
| Registration Number | Company registration / Companies House number for the UK (or equivalent elsewhere). |
These fields are captured during the registration flow on the storefront. Customers can fill them in themselves when they sign up, and ops can correct them in Vendure if they're wrong.
Approving new users on a company
When a new person at an existing company signs up, the platform can require approval from someone already on that company's account before the new user can place orders. This is the user-company access request flow.
The approval itself happens on the customer-facing site — an email goes to the existing account holder, who approves or rejects. There is no admin UI for approving access requests. If a customer says they're stuck waiting for approval, the fastest fix is usually to reach the existing account holder directly.
When to edit a company in Vendure
Manual edits in Vendure make sense when:
- You need to correct a typo in a company name, VAT number, or registration number.
- You're merging a duplicate (same company registered twice under different emails) — you'd reassign the customers to the correct company record, then delete the duplicate.
- You're assigning a customer to a company they should be part of but weren't when they first registered.
Manual edits don't make sense when:
- The correction should come from your ERP — if account numbers and VAT data sync from an ERP, change it there. Vendure will pick up the update.
Multi-currency and tenant notes
In multi-currency setups (e.g. Benelux with both GBP and EUR), each currency has a guest account number configured for anonymous orders. This is platform configuration, not something ops edits.
Some white-label tenants run under flowtechinternal for internal test accounts. Don't use the public site for real orders if your tenant has a separate internal account — talk to your account manager if you're unsure which to use.
Things that aren't company accounts (but look similar)
- Customer Groups — these are marketing-oriented segments (e.g. "VIP customers", "Trade members"). A customer can be in several groups; a company is one trading relationship.
- Administrators — staff logins for Vendure itself. Not the same as customer accounts.
If you see a customer who should be associated with a company but isn't, check whether they're on a Customer Group instead — they may have signed up with a different email domain or through a route that skipped company registration.