Customers and contacts

A customer is a private organization record. It can represent a person or business and bring together contacts, equipment, orders, and reports without requiring the customer to have a ReportArea account.

Availability: Professional and Company; requires owner, administrator, or Manage commercial operations. Level: Basic.

Purpose

Use Customers to keep a consistent commercial identity, communication details, billing address, and contact people. The selected language guides communications that support Spanish or English.

Requirements

Active membership, verified email, and commercial permission.
Select Person or Business, a display name, and language.
The record must be active for new operations.

Step by step

Open Customers and create a record.
Choose Person or Business. A Person requires a full name; a Business requires its legal name, while the trade name is optional and derived when left empty.
Select Spanish or English and add tax identifier, email, phone, billing address, and internal notes when applicable. You may leave the context accent on Automatic or choose an available tone. An ordinary customer can change between Person and Business; a linked counterpart protects type and activity through its canonical flow.
From the detail, add contacts with name, position, email, phone, and language. Inherit customer language keeps the stored value empty and always calculates the current effective language; use Spanish or English only as an explicit override.
Mark one contact as primary and, where appropriate, as a recipient of updates.
Review related orders and equipment from the customer record.
Choose Work in this context when applicable modules should deliberately inherit this customer. To manage several customers together, stay in General and use the local company filter.

Rules and effects

Only one contact can be primary at a time; selecting a new one clears the previous primary.
Emails are normalized, but ReportArea does not automatically merge duplicate customers.
Customers are deactivated rather than deleted, preserving history.
A business promoted to a Related company keeps its contacts, equipment, orders, and reports. Activation or suspension is then managed from that special record.
Only related companies with Client or Both role appear as commercial customers.
Notes are internal and are never published automatically.
Operational context never grants additional access. In General, filtering for this customer does not change navigation, the global accent, or the remembered selection.
The accent identifies context together with its name, icon, and badges. It does not accept arbitrary colors or replace semantic status, error, or focus colors.
Orders, sales, and payments provide an authorized quick-create action isolated to the organization. After saving, the new customer is selected and the parent form preserves lines, amounts, dates, and all other entered information.

Required and optional information

Required for a customer: type, full name for a Person or legal name for a Business, and language. Required for a contact: name. Optional: trade name, tax identifier, channels, address, notes, context accent, contacts, position, contact-language override, primary contact, and update-recipient flag.

Practical example

A workshop creates “North Transport” as a Business, selects English, and records Jane as the primary contact who receives updates. Future orders are grouped under the same record, and supported communications can prefer English.

Current limits

There is no global directory or automatic deduplication by name, email, or tax identifier.
Receives updates does not by itself publish internal messages or private information.
Customers are not normally deleted; they are deactivated.
A record linked as a Related company follows additional rules and cannot be activated from Customers.