Customers and leads

Customers are the core record in this system. Contacts, quotes, jobs, websites, invoices, tickets and files all sit underneath one, which is why it is worth getting the customer record right before doing anything else.

Creating a customer

Customers → Create Customer. The only field that is genuinely required is the name. Everything else can be filled in later, and most of it is there to be pulled into documents:

• Name — appears on every quote, invoice and PDF.
• Addresses — a customer can have several. One is the billing address used on invoices; the others are for delivery or site visits.
• Contacts — the actual people. See Contacts. A customer with no contact cannot be emailed, because there is no address to send to.
• Extra fields — anything this product does not model. See Extra fields.

Leads, customers and suppliers

They are the same record with a different customer type. Changing the type changes which menu the record appears under and which fields are shown; it does not move any data, and nothing attached to the record is lost. So converting a lead into a customer is a single dropdown, not a migration.

Types are defined in Settings → Customers → Types. Each one gets its own menu entry and its own numbering sequence.

Customer numbers

Customers can be numbered automatically. Two settings control it:

• customer_mask_0 — the format, written as a sprintf() pattern. CUST-%05d gives CUST-00017.
• customer_next_0 — the next number to be used.

If you are moving from another system and want to keep its numbering, set customer_next_0 to one above your highest existing number before importing.

Deleting a customer

Deleting a customer does not delete the invoices, jobs and quotes underneath it — those are kept, because deleting financial records silently would be the wrong thing to do. If you are tidying up rather than correcting a mistake, consider changing the customer type to something inactive instead.