Customers, contacts and properties

A customer is who you work for and who you bill. Contacts are the other people there. Properties are the addresses you look after. Owners and office members add and change all three, on the web and in the iPhone and Android apps. Technicians can read a customer's details from a visit or a job. This page follows the web.

Add a customer

One form takes the customer and their first property together.

TradeSender saves both and opens the new customer's page.

Add their first property now is ticked to begin with. The street, the city and the postcode go together: with only part of an address the form says "Add the street, city and postcode, or untick the property." Leave all the address fields empty and the customer is saved alone, so you can add someone by name and fill in the address later.

You can also add a customer without leaving a quote or a job. Choose New customer… in its Customer list. The quote or job then has the new customer and their property chosen. While you have no customers at all, a new job, quote or invoice opens the New customer form first, for the same result. Someone who wrote in through your website form becomes a customer from their enquiry: see Work an enquiry. To bring in a whole list, see Import customers and export your records.

Before you have any

Until you have a customer, the Customers page reads Bring your customers and offers three ways in.

Once you have customers, Import at the top of the page still opens Settings, Import and export. Owners and office members see these; an import emails nobody.

A company or a person

With a Company name, the customer is listed under the company, and the contact's name sits beneath it. Without one, they are listed under their own name. On the Customers page, the Business and Individual tabs split the two.

For owners and office members the list has an Owes column: what each customer still has to pay on their invoices, with the overdue part in red beneath.

Add a property

A property is an address you look after. One customer can have several: a landlord's houses, or a managing agent's blocks.

Access notes show on every visit to that property, on Today and on the visit's own page, so the crew reads them at the gate.

When a customer has one property, a new quote or job for them picks it for you.

Lawn size

Lawn size (m²) is the area of the lawn in square metres. On the customer's page the property then reads "Lawn 620 m²".

It saves you typing the quantity. When you pick a service on a quote, a job or an invoice for that property, Qty is set to the lawn size if all of these are true:

• The service's Unit is a square metre, written as "square metre", "m²", "m2" or "sq m".
• The service is lawn work by its name: it has a word such as lawn, turf, grass, mow, scarify, aerate, seed, feed, moss, weed or top dress in it.
• Qty is still the 1 the line started with.

So Turfing, priced per square metre, starts at 620. Patio and paving is priced the same way and is left at 1, because a patio is some other size. A quantity you have typed is never replaced, and a line you have saved keeps its quantity if you measure the lawn again later.

Bill someone else for a property

If a letting agent or a landlord pays for the work at one address, tick Bill someone else for this property and enter a Bill to name and their address. Quotes and invoices for work there go to that name and address. The customer's other properties are not affected.

Add a billing address

Choose Edit details on the customer's page, tick Add a billing address and fill it in. Quotes and invoices for that customer are then addressed there. Without a billing address, they are addressed to the property the work is at.

Add more contacts

The Contact name on the customer is the main contact. For anyone else, such as a caretaker or the accounts office, choose Add contact under Additional contacts. A contact has a Full name, a Job title, an Email address, a Phone number and Notes.

Additional contacts are there for you to look up. Send to on a quote or invoice still starts with the customer's own email address.

What the customer's page shows

Under the customer's name, owners and office members see what they owe: "Owes £378 · £198 overdue", or "Nothing outstanding". It adds up the balance on every invoice you have sent them. Drafts and void invoices are left out.

Jobs, Quotes and Invoices each list five. When there are more, View all opens the full list for this customer alone. The customer's name sits beside the search box there: choose it to see everyone's again.

The buttons at the top:

A technician who opens a customer from a visit sees the contact details, the jobs they are on, the properties, the contacts and the notes. The money, the quotes, the invoices and Sent are for owners and office members.

What has been sent

Sent lists each email to the customer, newest first, with its subject, the address it went to and the day.

Choose a row to open the quote, the invoice or the visit it was about. A Visit moved email about several visits opens the first of them. The panel shows the latest five, with a link under them to show the rest. Activity lists every customer's emails together.

Three things to know about it:

• Emails sent before this list was added, in October 2026, are not in it.
• It lists what TradeSender sent, not what arrived. An email that bounced still shows.
• The sign-in link a customer asks for themselves, on the portal's sign-in page, is not listed. Nor is the copy you get with Send me a copy.

Archive a customer, a property or a contact

A customer is archived, never deleted.

An archived customer leaves the Customers page, the workspace search and the Customer list on new quotes and jobs. Their jobs, quotes and invoices stay, with the customer's name on them. Open one and choose the name to see the customer's page, which then reads Archived. From there you can still choose Record payment while they owe something. They get no more automatic emails, and nothing more is collected from them by Direct Debit.

To archive a property or a contact, choose it on the customer's page. Archive property or Archive contact is at the foot of its form. An archived property leaves the customer's page and the Property lists. Jobs, quotes and invoices for it stay. If active jobs are still booked there, the dialog warns that their visits will no longer show the address: move those jobs to another property first.

In the phone apps, open the customer, choose the button with three dots at the top, then Archive customer. A property or a contact is archived the same way.

If you ask a connected AI assistant to delete a customer, it archives them.