Deactivate or delete a customer — and what each one means
By the end of this article you will know which of the two to use, what each one does, and how to handle a customer entered twice.
The short version: deactivate a customer you no longer work with; delete only a record that should never have existed.
Deactivate
- Open the customer and click Edit.
- Switch off Active Customer and click Update Customer.
The customer is now Inactive:
- They stay on file, with every job, quote, invoice, payment, vehicle and address exactly as it was. Nothing is hidden from you.
- They move from the Active tab to the Inactive tab on the Customers list, and the status chip on their page and in the list says Inactive.
- They stop appearing in the customer pickers when your team books a job or writes a quote, on the web and on the phone.
- They can no longer sign in to your customer portal, even if they were invited before.
- Marketing broadcasts leave them out.
To bring them back, edit again and switch Active Customer on. Everything resumes.
Delete
Delete is the trash icon in the customer’s header, followed by a confirmation naming the customer. Only people with the permission to delete customers see it.
The app refuses to delete a customer who has any jobs, quotes, invoices, payments, credit memos, subscriptions or sent messages on file — and says so, pointing you at deactivation instead. Deleting them would take those records off your books, and the books are the one thing the app will not let a click rewrite.
A customer with none of that — someone entered by mistake, or a duplicate you caught before booking anything — is deleted along with their addresses, vehicles and any card on file. They disappear from every list and cannot be opened.
A deleted customer can come back
If you later add a customer with the same email address, the app does not create a second record: it brings the deleted one back — keeping whatever you did not fill in this time, its old notes and tags for one — and treats them as a returning customer. That is deliberate — an email is one person — so a “delete and re-add” is a revival, not a clean slate. If they were deactivated before being deleted, they come back deactivated.
Duplicates
There is no merge. When the same person appears twice:
- Nothing has happened on one of them yet. Delete that one. If the good record is the one with the email, the duplicate probably has a different or missing email; check before you delete.
- Both have history. Deactivate the one you will stop using and say so in its Notes (“duplicate of Dana Reyes — use that record”). The history on each stays readable, and nobody books against the retired one.
Vehicles and addresses
The same two ideas apply below the customer: a vehicle has an Active switch for a car they sold, and Remove for one entered in error; an address can be removed unless a job still to be done or a plan still depends on it. See Add a vehicle to a customer and Customer addresses and your service area.
Good to know
- Deactivating is reversible; deleting a record with nothing on it is, in practice, only reversible by re-adding the same email.
- Both are web-only. The mobile app can add and edit a customer, but neither switching one off nor deleting one is offered there.
- Your plan’s customer limit counts active customers, so deactivating someone frees a seat; deleting does as well.