Customers and projects: add, edit, customer types, and sub-customers

Add a customer

1. Go to Lists → Customers and click + New Customer.
2. Type the name. Everything else is optional: company, email, phone, billing address, ship-to address, payment terms, tax status, credit limit and customer type.
3. Save. The customer can now be picked on invoices, estimates, sales receipts and payments.

Vendors work the same way under Lists → Vendors → + New Vendor. Coming from QuickBooks? Import from QuickBooks brings your whole customer list across.

Change a customer's details

In Lists → Customers, click Edit on the customer's row, change what you need and save. The new details are used on everything you create from then on.

Customer types

A customer type is a label you choose to group customers, such as Commercial, Residential, Wholesale or Government. To set or change it, open the customer with Edit (or start a new one) and use the Customer type box. Pick one of the suggestions or type your own; you don't have to set up a list of types first. The type is shown in the customer list, and you can search the list by it. Vendors have a Vendor type box that works the same way (Supplier, Subcontractor, Tax agency and so on).

Projects (sub-customers)

If you do separate projects for one customer (QuickBooks Desktop calls them jobs), add each one as a project under the customer:

1. Lists → Customers → + New Customer.
2. Type the project name (for example "Kitchen remodel").
3. In Sub-customer of (project, optional), choose the customer. Fill in the project info if you want it: status, type, start and end dates.
4. Save. The project shows as Customer:Project in every Customer:Project box. Its invoices, expenses and time roll up to the customer, and the project reports show each project's own profit.

Projects go one level deep: a project sits under a customer, but you can't put a project under another project. To split a big project into phases, add each phase as its own project under the customer (for example "Smith:Phase 1 framing" and "Smith:Phase 2 finish"), or use classes for the phases. You choose the customer when you create the project, and it can't be moved to a different customer afterwards.

Inactive, merge and delete

• Make inactive hides a customer you no longer work with from the pickers, but keeps all their history. Use it in preference to deleting.
• Merge (a button on the row, for administrators) moves all of one customer's transactions onto another, which is useful for duplicates such as "ABC Ltd" and "ABC Limited".
• Delete permanently removes a customer and can't be undone.