Customers and CRM

A customer is anyone you sell to, a person or a company. The record holds a customer number (assigned automatically from Settings → Numbering when you save, or typed by you; a number another customer already has is refused), name, company, email, phone, one address (line 1, line 2, city, state or region, postal code, country), a Language and notes. Language is the language their documents start in: Shop language (the one under Settings → Documents) or English (US), French, German, Spanish or Dutch. A new quote or invoice for the customer starts in it, and their packing slip and customer item cards print in it, unless the order's invoice already has a language of its own. A saved document keeps its own language. The Customers list also shows each customer's order count and lifetime spend, worked out from their orders.

New customer on the Customers page opens the form; you can also create a customer from the customer field on an order, quote or invoice without leaving it. Click a row to edit. The list has a Company column, and the search box matches the customer number, name, company, email and phone. An email that does not look like an address (a missing dot, as in name@examplecom) is not saved: the form asks you to check it. Import loads customers from a CSV file with name, email, phone, company, address and notes columns. If someone else saved the same customer after you opened it, Save says the customer was changed by someone else: Load the latest drops your edits and reloads theirs, and Keep mine saves yours over theirs (as for orders: see Someone else changed this order, in the Orders topic). If the customer was deleted meanwhile, Save as a new customer keeps what you typed as a new record.

Open a customer to see every order linked to them with its status, due date and total. Lifetime spend is the total of those orders, leaving out orders in board columns marked Exclude from revenue. Issued invoices with no order behind them (an invoice made straight from a quote, say) count too, once per quote and before tax. If Revenue counts is set to Payments received (Settings → Reports), lifetime spend is instead the payments received from that customer, before tax, plus orders without an invoice. Quotes linked to the customer are found on the Quotes page by the customer's name; their invoices and credit notes are on the customer itself (see Invoices, credit notes and what they owe).

Open a customer to see Invoiced, Paid and Owed, from issued invoices only. When part of what they owe is past due, Owed shows in red with how much is overdue. Below it:

• Invoices: the customer's invoices, open ones first, with number, date, total, what was paid and status. Click one to open it. On an open one, Record payment records a payment right there (see Payments on an invoice, in the Invoices topic).
• Credit notes: their credit notes; click one to open it.

Draft invoices count nothing until they are issued, and a credit note lowers what they owe by its amount.

A customer you no longer work with can be archived instead of deleted. Any member can open the customer and press Archive at the foot of the form. They leave the Customers list and every customer picker, and everything stays: their orders, quotes, invoices, history and spend. Their old invoices and orders still show them, as Name (archived) in the picker.

To see archived customers, turn on Show archived next to the search box on the Customers page (it shows how many); they are grayed with an Archived chip. Open one and press Unarchive to bring them back. Archiving and unarchiving are written to the activity log.

Every order, quote and invoice has a customer field. Pick a customer there to link the document to their record; that link is what builds their history and spend. The address on an invoice starts from the customer's address and can be edited per invoice. A document without a customer is allowed, and can be linked later by editing it.

If the same customer was created twice, select both rows on the Customers page and choose Merge (owners and admins only). The dialog shows the two records side by side; pick which value to keep for each field (Language included), and the surviving record takes over the other's orders, quotes and invoices before the duplicate is deleted. The merge is recorded in the activity log and cannot be undone.

Delete on the customer form (or from the list, for owners and admins) removes the record after a confirmation. Orders, quotes and draft invoices they were linked to are kept and lose their customer link. This cannot be undone.

A customer who has an invoice or credit note that is not a draft (issued, paid or void), or an active repeating invoice, cannot be deleted: those documents print the customer as their Bill To, and would lose it. The form says what they have and offers Archive instead. Deleting several customers from the list deletes the ones without documents, says how many were kept and offers to archive those. To keep a customer's history and get them off the list, archive them (see Archiving a customer).

A customer's notes are for what the team should remember about them, such as preferred materials, past issues or how they like to be contacted. Notes show whenever the customer is opened, so everyone sees them, whoever took the last order.