A customer contact is a person at a customer company, one of the people in charge you actually deal with. Where the customer record is the organisation, the contact is the human you address documents to: the name that appears as the attention line on a quotation, order or invoice, and the person whose phone or email you reach for when a deal needs chasing.
- How a contact relates to its parent customer
- What a contact record holds
- How a contact is used as the attention person on documents
- How inline creation and soft delete work
Where it sits
A contact always belongs to exactly one customer; a customer can have many contacts. The contact has no documents or money of its own, it is a person attached to the organisation, surfaced wherever a document needs a named human rather than a company.
Anatomy of the record
A contact is a light record. It carries a generated code, a first and last name, a designation (their job title), and contact details: phone, fax, mobile and email. You can add a photo, mark it active or not, and attach files or notes. There is no stored full-name field; the display name is built on the fly as “First Last – Designation – Company”, so it reads sensibly in any picker without you maintaining it.
How it behaves
The attention person
On a quotation, order or invoice, the contact is chosen as the attention (Attn) person. The picker is filtered to the document's customer, so you only ever see that company's people, and the chosen contact prints on the document as who it is addressed to.
Inline creation and soft delete
A contact can be created inline while you are setting up a new customer, so you capture the buyer and the company in one pass. Deleting a contact is a soft delete: past documents that named them keep reading correctly because the record is retained, just hidden from new selection.
Good practice
- Keep designations current. Because the display name includes the designation, an out-of-date title shows up on every picker and document.
- One contact per real person. Avoid shared or generic “Accounts” contacts where you can, so the attention line means something.
- Deactivate leavers. Mark a contact inactive when they leave rather than deleting, to keep historical documents readable.