Accounts and contacts

An account is a customer you do business with. A contact is a person at that customer whom you speak to and send documents to. Every sale in easySales starts from these two records.

How it works

When the customer is a company, create a Business account for it and add each person you deal with as a contact under it — the owner, a project manager, the accounts clerk. When the customer is an individual, create a Personal account: the person is the customer, so easySales keeps the account and its one contact together, and you do not add further contacts to it.

Quotations and invoices are addressed to a contact, and they belong to that contact’s account. Receipts, credit and the customer’s statement are kept per account, so one payment can settle invoices addressed to different people at the same customer.

An account can be marked as a Customer, a Supplier or both. Only customers can be chosen on quotations, invoices and credit notes.

Example

Lim & Co starts working with Harbour Café. Here is how to set it up.

In Accounts, create a Business account named Harbour Café.
On the account, select New contact twice: once for the owner, who approves quotations, and once for the accounts clerk, who receives invoices.
Address quotations to the owner and invoices to the clerk.

Both people’s documents appear under Harbour Café. When the café pays three invoices in one transfer, you record one receipt for the account, whichever contact each invoice was addressed to.

Good to know

Keep one account per customer. Add people as contacts rather than creating an account for each person.
The account type — Business or Personal — cannot be changed after the account is created.
If someone leaves the customer, their contact can be deactivated; the account and all its documents stay as they are.

Terms

Account: The company or person you treat as the customer.
Business account: An account for a company or organisation, with any number of contacts.
Personal account: An account for an individual customer, kept together with that person’s one contact.
Contact: A person connected to an account.
Customer / Supplier: The role an account plays for you; only customers appear on sales documents.

Common misunderstandings

An account is not a login. People who sign in to easySales are users, not accounts.
A contact is not a second copy of the account. It is one person at that customer.
A Personal account does not need a separate company record. The person is the customer.

Where to find it

Use Accounts for customer records and Contacts for the people connected to them.