Customers
Your customer directory holds each customer's contact details, billing address, default payment terms, credit limit, and category — plus multiple named contacts per customer. It's the master record that invoices, credit memos, and AR reports all reference, so keeping it accurate keeps your receivables clean. Deleting a customer only hides them, so historical invoices never lose their customer.
Key capabilities
- Core profile: name, email, address, phone, tax ID, website, notes, and category
- Default payment terms that auto-fill on new invoices for that customer
- Optional credit limit per customer
- Status of active, inactive, or blocked
- Multiple contacts per customer, with a designated primary contact
- Duplicate detection before creating, by fuzzy name, email, and tax ID
- Bulk Import CSV with a downloadable template; duplicate emails are skipped
- Suggest with AI for one customer's category and bulk Auto-categorize of uncategorized customers
- Payment Analysis panel: AI payment-behavior analysis flagging late and delinquent customers
- Tags on each customer, status filter, and search by name or email
- Export of the customer list to Excel
- Deletion that hides the customer but keeps references on existing invoices and credit memos
- Linked to a global counterparty registry for cross-business analytics
How it works
A customer record is the hub: invoices, credit memos, contacts, and payment terms all hang off it. Create or import customers, enrich them with AI, then reference them everywhere downstream.
flowchart TD
create["Create / import customer"] --> dup{"Possible duplicate?"}
dup -->|"Yes"| review["Review match"]
dup -->|"No"| record["Customer record"]
review --> record["Customer record"]
record --> invoices["Invoices & credit memos"]
record --> contacts["Contacts & payment terms"]
invoices --> ar["AR balance & aging"]How to use it
- Open Customers and click New Customer.
- Enter name and email (required), plus phone, category, address, tax ID, website, and notes as needed. Possible duplicates are flagged as you leave the name field.
- Set a default payment term, a status, and an optional credit limit — the payment term defaults onto every new invoice.
- Expand a customer row to see and add named contacts (marking one primary) for invoice delivery and communications.
- Use Import CSV to load customers in bulk from the provided template (Download template CSV), or Export to download your list.
- Click Auto-categorize to let AI categorize every uncategorized customer in the background, then refresh the list. Click Payment Analysis for AI risk signals.
Pro tips
- A customer needs both an active status and an email to be invoiceable, so fill in email up front.
- Set default payment terms per customer to save time on every invoice — you can still override per invoice.
- Run the duplicate check before bulk imports; bulk upload skips rows whose email already exists rather than creating doubles.
- Auto-categorize is safe to re-run: already-categorized customers are skipped, and it processes in the background (up to 500 per call), so refresh to watch progress.
- Deleting a customer hides them from pickers and lists, but they stay linked on past invoices and credit memos.
- Use the status field deliberately — blocked signals do-not-invoice, while inactive simply hides routine customers without losing history.
In-depth guide
Status & capabilities
- Active — not deleted and status is Active (ready to invoice when email is on file).
- Can Be Invoiced — additionally requires a valid email address on file.
- Delete — hides the customer and keeps the record for historical invoices; it is never a hard removal.
- Blocked and inactive customers stay in the directory but flag that you shouldn't bill them.
Contacts
- Each customer can have multiple contacts (name, email, phone, role, primary flag, notes).
- The primary contact is intended for invoice delivery and communications.
- Contacts are managed independently from the core record, so you can add or update a billing contact without touching the customer's profile.
Duplicate detection
- Before creating or updating, the duplicate check compares name (fuzzy), email, and tax ID against existing customers and surfaces likely duplicates.
- This is a detection-and-review aid — it surfaces likely duplicates so you can avoid creating them rather than merging after the fact.
AI & automation
Three AI features assist here, all running in the background and saving results to the customer record:
- Categorization — suggests a category/subcategory with confidence from name, email, website, and address.
- Auto-categorize — schedules background categorization for uncategorized customers.
- Payment-behavior analysis — assesses each customer's paying patterns with risk scores.
Related features & accounting
- Customers anchor accounts receivable: their invoices post AR and roll up into the AR Aging report, and credit memos reduce their balances.
- Default payment terms flow onto invoices to set due dates.
- The counterparty registry link enables cross-business analytics for advisory firms managing many clients.
Limits & edge cases
- Bulk CSV upload reports created and skipped counts plus per-row errors; existing emails are skipped, not overwritten.
- Email is stored case-insensitively, so casing differences won't create separate records.
- A credit limit cannot be negative.
Developers and Regent
Developers can manage customers, contacts and imports over the API; see the Customers API guide. Regent can create and update customers and look up a customer's balance, cash receipts and statement for you in chat.