Customers and contacts

Everyone you deal with — customers, suppliers, or both — is a contact. Ticking the customer box or the supplier box on the same record is what tells them apart, so a business you both buy from and sell to is one record, not two.

Which screen for which job

You need to	Go to
Add or edit a customer	The customer record
Log a phone call or a visit	The customer record
Track someone who has not bought yet	Leads and marketing
Run a points scheme	Loyalty
Record that a customer does not pay tax	The customer record
Add or edit a supplier	Suppliers
Rate your suppliers	Suppliers

Two menu entries that are not what they look like

Customer 360 is the Customers screen

Contacts → Customer 360 opens the exact same screen as Contacts → Customers — the same list, with the same filters. There is no separate 360-degree view.

The nearest thing to a full picture of one customer is their own page: open a customer from the list and use the tabs across the top.

Customer Portal is a signpost, not a screen

Contacts → Customer Portal opens a short message: “Your own customers’ self-service portal lives elsewhere in the product. There is nothing to configure here yet.”

There is nothing to set up on it. What your customers can actually do for themselves depends on whether you run an online shop:

• With an online shop, they get an account area on it — order history, delivery addresses and gift registries all work. Wallet, loyalty points, refund requests, notification settings and bank details each say they are not available yet.
• With or without one, every invoice, receipt, statement and delivery note you email carries a link to a page where they can read it, print it, and pay if it is an invoice. See what your customers receive — including the setting you must fill in if you have no online shop, or those links do not appear at all.

The menu entry needs the Professional plan, and does not say so

Below Professional the entry still appears, and opening it says you lack permission. That is a plan limit being reported as a permissions problem.

Where customer information turns up elsewhere

A customer record is read by more of the app than you might expect:

• The till — attaching a customer to a sale, and their tax-exempt status
• Credit sales — a named customer is required to sell on account
• Layaway and pickup-later — both need a real customer, not a walk-in
• Financials — invoices, payments, credit notes and aged debt all key off the contact
• Deliveries — the recipient details are pre-filled from the customer

That is why it is worth getting the record right once rather than typing a walk-in name each time.

Plans

	Plan
Customers, suppliers, activities, leads, loyalty accounts	All plans
Tax exemption certificates	Growth
Supplier scorecards	Professional
Customer segments, marketing automation, surveys	Professional