Create and manage personal and business customers

A Customer is the billable account the shop serves, and it has one of two types: a personal customer billed under a person's name, or a business customer billed under a company name. Every Estimate, Repair Order, and Invoice belongs to one customer, so the customer record comes first. You can create one ahead of time from the Customers page or on the spot while starting a document.

Customers belong to your Organization and record the Shop where they were created. The Customers page lists the ones created at your active Shop. Staff with org-wide read permission also see customers from your other Shops in Search, which is what makes cross-shop history possible. See Organization defaults and shop overrides.

What the type changes

The type decides which name identifies the account. A personal customer is named by first and last name. A business customer is named by its business name, and the people at that business (an owner, drivers, a fleet manager) are Customer Contacts attached to the account. How to manage those people is covered in Manage customer communication details, Additional people, labels, and credit settings.

The name you see everywhere (the customer list, the page header, Workflow cards, the calendar, Search results) is derived from those fields. Edit the first and last name or the business name and every surface updates; there is no separate display name to keep in sync.

Beyond the name, the two types carry the same fields and work the same way on documents. There is no business-only pricing or billing behavior yet. To group fleet, wholesale, or family accounts for scanning and filtering, give the customer a label in the Tags field (one label per customer; see Manage customer communication details, Additional people, labels, and credit settings). The customer list can filter by type and shows the label as a column.

Create a customer

1. Open Customers in the sidebar and select Add Customer.
2. Pick Personal or Business at the top of the dialog.
3. Enter the name. A personal customer needs a first and last name. A business customer needs a business name; the contact first and last name beside it are optional.
4. Fill in what you know: phone, email, preferred channel (SMS, call, or email), address, and internal notes. A personal customer can also take a birthday. Everything except the name can wait.
5. Select Create customer. The new customer's page opens.

The customer record itself holds everything you enter: the phone and email become the customer's own contact points, and the address and birthday are customer fields. For a business customer, the optional contact first and last name create a name-only Additional person at the business you can flesh out later; see Manage customer communication details, Additional people, labels, and credit settings.

Two checkboxes sit in the form. Tax exempt / non-taxable asks for a reason (resale, non-profit 501(c)(3), government, fleet card, or other) and an optional certificate ID. Approved marketing texts records a marketing opt-in against the phone number you entered - only tick it if the customer explicitly agreed, since service texts are covered by them being your customer and marketing isn't.

Two shortcuts skip the Customers page:

• From the command menu. Select the plus button beside Search, or select New after confirming that a Customer search has no match, then choose Customer. Search text is not copied into the form. See Navigation, search, and basic concepts.
• While starting a document. The customer picker on a new Repair Order, Estimate, Counter Sale, or appointment has a New customer button. It opens the same dialog, and the new customer is selected on the document when you finish.

Creating a customer requires the customers create User Permission for the active Shop. See Assign Shop Roles, shop access, and User Permissions.

Edit a customer

Open the customer from the Customers page and select Edit on the Customer Info card. The dialog is the same form as Add Customer: type, names, birthday (personal customers), tags, tax exemption, phone, email, preferred channel, address, internal notes, and Allow this customer to pay online. Portal payments are currently unavailable, so this stored preference has no effect until payment processing ships. The Phone and Email fields edit the customer's primary number and address; extra numbers and additional people are managed on the customer page itself, not in this dialog.

You can change the type here, in both directions. A shop often needs this when a person turns out to be the front for a company account, or the other way around. Save changes stays disabled until the name the new type derives its account name from is filled in: a business name when switching to business, a first or last name when switching to personal.

Two edits worth knowing the mechanics of:

• Clearing the Phone or Email field removes that primary contact point when you save. If the customer has other numbers or addresses on file, the next one in line becomes the primary.
• Checking or unchecking Tax exempt / non-taxable recalculates the customer's open Estimates and Repair Orders as soon as you save. Finalized Invoices keep the tax they were finalized with.

Vehicles are added and corrected from the customer page's Vehicles section; see Add vehicles and correct vehicle information. The History tab is covered in Understand vehicle ownership, service history, and historical invoices.

Find a customer in the list

The Customers page search box matches names, business names, tags, and phone-number fragments as you type. Phone formatting is ignored, so digits match numbers stored with spaces, parentheses, or dashes. The type filter narrows the list to Personal or Business customers, and each row shows the main contact, vehicle count, last visit, type, and tags. Download exports the current filtered rows as a CSV. For finding a customer from anywhere in the app, including by a vehicle's VIN or plate, use Search (Navigation, search, and basic concepts).

You can't delete customers, but you can merge duplicates

There is no delete or archive action for a customer in the app, so a test customer stays in the list. Two records for the same real customer can be combined: the Merge customer action on the customer page folds the duplicate's history, vehicles, and contact details into the surviving record. See Find and resolve duplicate customers or vehicles.