Customers & Contacts
Everything in Floatless hangs off the customer record: orders, subscriptions, invoices, the portal, tax treatment, and document language. A well-built customer record makes every downstream workflow quiet; a half-filled one produces surprises at invoice time.
Manage customers at Customers in the sidebar.
When should I read this?
- You are adding a new customer and want the fields right the first time.
- A customer has separate billing and shipping contacts.
- An invoice went to the wrong place or the wrong language.
Use cases
| Scenario | What you do |
|---|---|
| B2B customer with an AP department | Add the AP person as a billing contact and the warehouse as shipping; documents route correctly forever. |
| Quebec customer | Leave the customer's language to auto (Quebec forces French) or set French explicitly. |
| Tax-exempt business | Tick tax exempt and record the certificate number — invoices skip tax with the reference on file. |
The customer profile
| Field group | What it drives |
|---|---|
| Name, email, currency | Default currency for orders; the primary email receives notifications. |
| Billing & shipping addresses | Tax jurisdiction (ship-to based) and document addressing. |
Language (en / fr / es) |
Language of invoices, receipts, and their portal — falls back to the organization default. |
| Tax exempt flag + certificate no. | Skips tax computation; supports B2B exemption audits. |
| Default payment method | Powers auto-pay on posted invoices. |
Contacts: the people behind the account
A customer can hold multiple contacts, each with a role:
- Billing contact — receives invoices and payment notices.
- Shipping contact — defines the ship-to location that drives tax.
- Primary contact — the default selection on orders and the portal's greeting.
Add contacts from the customer detail page (Add contact), and set the primary deliberately — order forms preselect it.
Open the customer portal
From the customer detail page, Generate Portal Link creates a 7-day self-service link for this customer (see Customer portal & requests). Generate a fresh one whenever needed; old links expire on schedule.
Lifecycle
Customers are created, edited, and (when nothing depends on them) archived from the list. A customer with billing history keeps that history — deletion is blocked by design, and the record becomes the audit anchor for every document issued to them.
Common issues
- Tax looks wrong on their invoices. Check the shipping contact's address — tax follows ship-to jurisdiction, not the account's billing address.
- Documents arrive in English but the customer is French. Set the customer's language field (or rely on the Quebec auto-rule); the organization default only applies when no preference exists.
- Two records for one customer. Merge by archiving the duplicate and re-pointing its contacts — billing history cannot be moved between records.