Add a customer
By the end of this article you will have a customer on file with the details every quote, job and invoice for them starts from.
Before you start
Every customer belongs to your business alone, and one email address can belong to only one customer. The email matters more than it looks: it is how the customer signs in to your customer portal, and it is where their quotes, invoices and receipts go. A phone number is what text messages and reminders use. Neither is required — a walk-in customer with no email is fine — but a customer without them cannot be reached by the app.
Add the customer
- Open Customers in the sidebar and click Add Customer.
- Choose the Customer Type: Person or Business. A person needs at least a First Name or a Last Name; a business needs a Business Name, and the first and last name become the contact person there.
- Enter Email and Phone.
- Choose the Language for emails: English or Spanish. It is the language their emails and documents arrive in, and it starts as the language your business signed up in.
- Add Notes for anything your team should know before they arrive — gate codes, a dog in the yard, how they like to be contacted. Notes show on the customer’s page and can be translated there.
- Add Tags to group customers your own way: fleet, referral, monthly wash. Tags are how the marketing pages pick an audience later.
- Under Invoicing, choose How this customer is invoiced: Per job raises one invoice for each job when you create it; Monthly collects their completed jobs into one invoice on the Invoicing day of the month you pick (Last day of the month is the default). New customers start from the default set in Settings.
- Click Create Customer.
You land back on the list. Open the customer to add their addresses and vehicles — see Customer addresses and your service area and Add a vehicle to a customer.
Find a customer again
The list searches by name, email and phone as you type. Switch between the table and the card grid with the two icons beside the search box. The All, Active and Inactive tabs split the list by whether the customer is still active (see Deactivate or delete a customer); the counts on each tab are for your whole customer base, not the current page.
Click a column heading — Customer, Phone, Status, Created — to sort. Download CSV exports the customers matching the current search and tab, with their name, email, phone, status and the date they were added.
Good to know
- A returning customer comes back as themselves. If you add a customer whose email belongs to a customer you deleted earlier, the deleted record is brought back with its history rather than a second one created. If the email belongs to a customer who is still on file, the form tells you and nothing is saved.
- Your plan sets the customer limit. When you reach it, the form refuses the new customer with a message saying so.
- Editing is the same form. On the customer’s page, Edit opens it with the same fields plus the Active Customer switch.