Customers
Customers are the people and businesses you work with. Every quote, job, and invoice belongs to a customer.
Overview
A customer record stores their name, contact details, addresses, and billing preferences. Customers are the central entity in Workcanon — all quotes, jobs, invoices, and credit notes are linked to a customer.
Each customer has:
- One or more contacts with email, phone, and document delivery preferences
- A billing address and optional site addresses for job locations
- Optional payment terms and VAT number
- A financial summary showing quotes, jobs, invoiced totals, and outstanding balance
Creating Customers
When creating a customer, you provide:
- Name (required) — the customer's name or business name
- VAT number (optional) — their tax identification number (see VAT Numbers)
- Payment terms (optional) — override your account's default payment terms for this customer (see Payment Terms)
- Internal notes (optional) — notes visible only to your team, shown on all jobs for this customer
A primary contact and billing address are created automatically as part of the customer form. You can add more contacts and addresses at any time.
Contacts
Each customer has one or more contacts. One contact is marked as the primary contact — this is the main person you communicate with.
Each contact can have:
- Name (required)
- Email (optional)
- Phone (optional, stored in international format)
- Role (optional, e.g. "Site Manager", "Accounts")
Document Delivery Preferences
Each contact has delivery preferences that control which emails they receive:
| Preference | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Invoices | Receives invoice emails when you send an invoice |
| Quotes | Receives quote emails when you send a quote |
| Job reports | Receives completion report emails when you send a job report |
| Credit notes | Receives credit note and debit note emails |
The primary contact's delivery preferences are all enabled by default. You can add additional contacts and configure their preferences independently. The primary contact's name is automatically kept in sync with the customer name if left blank.
Example: Customer contacts
Managing Director
jane@smithelectrical.ie
+353 87 123 4567
Site Manager
tom@smithelectrical.ie
Addresses
Customers have two types of addresses:
Billing Address
Used on invoices and other financial documents. Every customer has one billing address.
Site Addresses
Locations where work is performed. You can add multiple site addresses with labels to identify them (e.g. "Warehouse", "Head Office").
Each address has a line 1 (required), line 2, city, state/county, postcode, and country (required). When creating a job for a customer, you can select one of their site addresses as the job location.
Example: Customer addresses
123 Main Street
Dublin 2
D02 XY45
Ireland
Unit 5, Industrial Estate
Cork
T12 AB34
Ireland
Search & Filtering
The customer list supports searching by customer name or contact email. The search is case-insensitive and matches partial text, so searching for "smith" will find "Jane Smith" and "Smithson Ltd".
Results are paginated. You can also search for customers by name when selecting a customer in other forms (e.g. when creating a quote or job).
Customer Details
The customer detail page shows all their information at a glance, including a financial summary:
- Quotes — number of quotes for this customer
- Jobs — number of jobs for this customer
- Total invoiced — sum of all non-voided invoices
- Outstanding — unpaid invoice balance minus any applied credit
From the customer page you can view all their contacts and addresses, and navigate directly to their quotes, jobs, and invoices.
Example: Customer summary
Payment Terms
Payment terms define how many days a customer has to pay an invoice after it is issued. Your account has a default payment term set in Settings.
You can override this per customer. When a customer has a custom payment term, it is used instead of the account default when calculating invoice due dates. If no override is set, the account default applies.
For example, if your account default is 30 days but a particular customer has agreed to 14-day terms, set their payment terms to 14. All invoices for that customer will then be due 14 days after issue.
VAT Numbers
You can store a VAT (tax identification) number for each customer. VAT numbers follow country-specific formats (e.g. IE1234567T for Ireland, GB123456789 for the UK).
When a VAT number is entered, it is validated automatically in the background. The validation status is shown on the customer detail page, indicating whether the number is valid, invalid, or pending validation.
Deleting & Restoring
When you delete a customer, the record is soft-deleted — it is hidden from your customer list but not permanently removed. All associated records are also soft-deleted:
- Quotes
- Jobs
- Invoices
- Contacts
- Addresses
- Correction documents (credit notes and debit notes)
After deletion, a flash message appears with an Undo link that lets you immediately restore the customer and all their associated records.