Organisations, customers and sites

Three different things, and which is which

The customer book has three kinds of record in it, and the whole section makes sense once the difference is clear:

• A customer is a person. John at Building Co. They have a name, an email address and a phone number, and jobs belong to them.
• An organisation is the firm behind them. Building Co itself. Optional: a homeowner belongs to no firm and nothing about them changes.
• A site is a place you attend. 12 Bath St. It belongs to the firm where there is one, and to the person where there is not.

The distinction earns its keep because an office does not think in people. Four people at Building Co email in about the same building, and every one of those jobs is Building Co's job at 12 Bath St — not four unrelated requests from four strangers who happen to share a street address.

What happened to my customer list

Nothing was taken away. Every customer you had is still a customer, still holding every job they ever raised. What is new is a second tab beside them — Organisations — and a firm on a customer's record that starts out empty for everybody. Until you file someone under a firm, they behave exactly as they did before.

Anyone in the company can look a customer, a firm or a site up; a technician standing at the door needs the phone number as much as the office does. Changing any of the three is an administrator's job, because these records feed reporting.

Filing people under a firm

Open Organisations and press New organisation. It is four fields — name, email, phone, notes — in a box on the list rather than a page of its own, because a firm is nearly always created while checking it is not there already; saving takes you straight to it. Then, on the firm's own page, the People card has a search box: type a name, an email or a phone number and pick the person.

That is all filing someone does: it sets the firm on their record. It does not touch their jobs, and it does not move the sites they already had. A person you take back out keeps everything too. The search deliberately offers people who are already at another firm, with that firm shown beside them, because moving somebody who was filed wrongly is exactly what the control is for.

The firm shows on the customer's own page, under their name, as a link across to it — but it is not a field you edit there. Attaching and detaching happen on the firm's page, because that is where the consequences of it are: the people, the sites and the portal switch.

The firm's page then gathers up what its people hold: everyone at it, their open job counts, the firm's sites, and every job anyone at it has ever raised. The counts on the directory are links — "4 open jobs" is only half an answer, and the next question is always which four.

Where sites come from

Mostly, you do not create them. When a job arrives with an address on it, that address is looked up and a site is either matched or created, and the job is linked to it. Sites are how the same building stops being retyped once a week.

Two things are worth knowing about how that matching works.

What counts as the same address

Case, spacing and punctuation are ignored, so 12 Bath St, 12 bath st and 12 Bath St. are one place. Punctuation becomes a space rather than disappearing, so 12/14 Bath St matches 12 14 Bath St while 1214 Bath St — a different street number — stays a different place. What is not folded is spelling: "Bath St" and "Bath Street" are two sites until somebody says otherwise.

The text your customer actually wrote is never overwritten. It stays on the job, word for word, beside the link to the site — what somebody asked for is evidence, and tidying it in place would destroy it.

Who the site belongs to

The firm, if the person who asked belongs to one. That is the rule that makes the whole thing worth having: four people at Building Co emailing about the same building share one site rather than accumulating one each. A customer with no firm owns their own sites.

One consequence to expect: a customer who is later moved into a firm keeps the sites they already had. Their firm's page shows both — the firm's own sites and the ones still held by its people — because that is the list somebody wants to see, but the two halves are really there.

Managing sites by hand

There is a Sites card on a customer's page and on a firm's, and no separate Sites section in the sidebar. That is deliberate: a site means nothing apart from whoever owns it, and a top-level list of every address you have ever worked at answers no question anybody asks.

Add site asks for an address, and offers a Label, a suburb, a city and a postcode. The label is hinted What the office calls it — "Head office", "Shop 1". Optional. — it is what a picker shows, falling back to the address where there is none. Added on John's page while John is at Building Co, the site still lands on Building Co, for the reason above.

Add an address the owner already has and it is refused rather than silently merged: "That address is already a site here: Head office." Deleting is refused too while any job still points at the site — "That site has 3 work orders on it, so it was not deleted. Move those jobs to another site first." A completed job's address is part of the record of what was done, and quietly cutting the link on every one of them is not something a delete button should be able to do.

Merging two customers who are the same person

A customer book that grew out of email traffic accumulates the same person several times over — John appears as john@building.test, j.marsh@building.test and "John Marsh" without anybody deciding that. The Merge duplicates card on a customer's page is the tidy-up.

The record you are looking at is the one that survives. Search for the duplicate by name, email or phone, add as many as you need — one person with four old addresses is the ordinary case, not the exotic one — then Review merge. The confirmation names every record being destroyed, one by one, because "2 customers" is not something anybody can check.

You may not have to search at all. The card also suggests duplicates it has noticed, each carrying the reason it was suggested: the same phone number however it was typed, an email domain the two share (ignoring the domains everybody shares, so Gmail is not a signal), or a name close enough that "John Marsh" and "Jon Marsh" surface while "John Marsh" and "John's Cafe" do not. It suggests and never acts.

What a merge actually does

• Every job the duplicate held moves to the survivor, and each one gets a line on its own timeline saying so, naming the record it came from. A merge is never invisible in hindsight.
• The duplicate's sites move too — folded into the survivor's where the same address is already there, so you do not end up with 12 Bath St twice.
• If the survivor has no firm and the duplicate has one, the survivor inherits it. Which of two rows happened to carry the firm is an accident of which address arrived first, and tidying up a customer book must not quietly drop somebody out of their firm.
• If both have a firm, the survivor keeps its own. That disagreement is for a person to settle afterwards from the firms' own pages, not for a merge to settle in favour of the record being deleted.
• The duplicate is deleted.

It cannot be undone. The screen says so — "This is irreversible — there is no undo" — and it means it: the duplicate row is gone, not hidden. Several duplicates chosen together are one action, all or nothing, so you never end up half-merged.

What a firm's portal user sees

This is the change most likely to surprise somebody. A customer who belongs to a firm sees every job raised by anyone at that firm in their portal, not only their own. John and Andy at Building Co open the same list. A customer with no firm sees only their own jobs, exactly as before.

So filing people under a firm is a decision about who can see whose jobs, and it is worth making on purpose rather than as a tidiness exercise. Two households that happen to share a property manager should not be one organisation.

There are two portal switches and they are independent. A firm's page can revoke access for everyone at it at once; a customer's own page can revoke just that person. Restoring the firm does not un-revoke somebody the office revoked by name, and the toast says so when you do it: "Portal access restored. Anyone revoked individually stays revoked." Both switches also burn any access link already in flight, so an email sent five minutes ago stops working.

The rest of the portal — the two kinds of link, what a customer can and cannot do there, and letting them raise a request — is the customer portal.

Where a firm shows up elsewhere

Sites and firms are ordinary parts of a job. The site can be picked or corrected on a job, an administrator can move a job to another customer or another address, and a saved report can carry the site as a column — see reports and saved views.