Ledgr/Documentation/Contacts

Contacts

Watch the lesson: Add a customer and send a statement (1:49).

One list for everyone you deal with, with the money position attached to each of them.

Contact types

Every contact has one of five types, and the type decides which fields you see and where the contact appears elsewhere in the app:

• Customer — appears in the invoice wizard, gets statements, has a credit position
• Supplier — appears on bills, expenses and purchase orders
• Employee — links to the payroll module
• Practitioner — the tax practitioner or firm handling your SARS work
• Other — anyone else you want in the address book

Add a contact

1. Contacts → New

   Pick the type first — it changes the form.

2. Identity and reach

   Name, email, phone, VAT number and address. The email is what invoices and statements go to; the phone is what WhatsApp uses, so store it in international format (+27…). A supplier's VAT number is ten digits beginning with 4; it is what lets you claim the input VAT on their bills, and text such as "N/A" is not accepted as one.

3. Trading terms

   Payment terms in days and a credit limit. The terms are what a new invoice to this customer starts at, and so set its due date. The credit limit drives the utilisation bar and the credit status — see credit management.

4. Tags

   VIP, Preferred, At Risk, New, International, Government, NPO, or a B-BBEE level from 1 to 4. Filter the list by tag with the tag menu beside the search box.

5. Document language

   English or Afrikaans. Invoices, quotes and every other document you send this contact, and their statements, are written in it — the headings, the totals and the month names. Words you renamed yourself in your invoice settings stay as you typed them, and an Afrikaans tax invoice still carries the words "Tax Invoice", which the VAT Act requires.

6. Your own fields

   A field you add under Invoicing → Settings → Custom fields with Contacts ticked appears on this form: an account manager, a branch code, a delivery window. Contact fields count toward the same ten custom fields as your document fields, and are never printed on a document.

Import and export your contact book

Export on the Contacts screen downloads every contact as a CSV, with a column for each of your own contact fields, headed with its name. Import reads that file back, or a CSV exported by your previous system, and shows how each column was read before anything is written.

• A row whose name matches no contact makes a new one, with every column it has.
• A row whose name matches a contact you already have fills that contact's empty fields only. An import never overwrites a value, so re-importing an old export cannot undo your edits.
• A column headed with one of your own fields' names fills that field.
• Up to 5 000 contacts a file. A larger book is refused rather than cut short; use Settings → Export your data for the whole of it.

The contact detail view

Opening a contact gives you the full picture in one screen:

• Information grid — everything you captured, editable in place
• Credit position — a bar showing how much of the limit is used, red once it is over
• Invoice history — every document issued to them with status and balance
• Communication History — every invoice, reminder and statement sent (and any that failed, with the reason), calls and notes, and the sales team's activities, newest first

Delivery sites

A customer who takes delivery at more than one place — a head office and a Durban branch, say — has a delivery site for each, on the customer's page under Delivery sites. Give each a name and an address a driver can find; one is the default, which a new order starts on.

• On an order, delivery note or invoice, Deliver to offers the customer's sites. The document keeps the address as it was when you chose it, so editing the site later does not change a document already sent.
• The delivery is planned and driven to that site, and a location placed or learned on a stop there is saved on that site — the Durban branch's pin never moves head office.
• A customer with no sites yet is delivered to the address on their contact; the first location saved for them makes that address their first site.
• Merging two contacts brings both sets of sites together; the surviving contact keeps its own default.
• Saving a site places it on the map from its address when the address points to exactly one place. If it cannot be placed, the site says why; place it on the first delivery there, from the stop.

Statements

A customer's detail view offers two kinds, and they answer different questions:

• Statement — what the customer owes you now: each unpaid invoice with how long it has been outstanding, and the ageing beneath. It opens as a preview laid out as it will print, and you send it by email or WhatsApp from there.
• Activity Statement — everything that happened on the account between two dates: the balance at the start, every invoice, credit note and payment in the period, and the balance at the end. Choose From and To, then Download or Send Statement to email it.

Every send is logged on the customer's Communication History, whether it went or not. Statements in the Contacts menu lists every customer with a Preview and a Send each, and Bulk Send All Statements emails everyone with an address — it tells you how many will go and who is skipped before anything is sent.

Statements every month, by themselves

In Invoicing → Settings → Automation, tick Send statements every month and choose the day and how they go — email or WhatsApp. From that day each month, every customer who owes you something is sent their statement once, under the name of the company they owe (invoices raised under no company come as one statement of their own, under your business's name). A customer without an address on the channel you chose gets it the other way; a customer whose reminders are paused, or whose balance is nothing, is left out. If a day is missed — the email service was down, say — the next day's run sends what did not go; where a statement reached some of a customer's addresses and not others, it is not sent again to the ones it reached. Each one is on the customer's Communication History like any other send, WhatsApp ones count towards your WhatsApp messages, and Send Statement still sends one by hand whenever you like.

Aged debtors

Open Ageing Report from the Contacts menu; the same figures are in Reports. Each customer's balance is split into four buckets by how far past due it is — current (up to 30 days), 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days — with a bar per bucket and the total receivables.

• Tap a bucket in the Totals card — it shows how many customers owe in it — and the By Customer table narrows to those customers. Tap it again, or Show all, for the whole book.
• Send Statements emails a statement to every customer in the table as it stands — the bucket you chose, or everyone owing. It asks first, naming how many will go and who has no email address and will be skipped.
• Remind on a row sends that one customer their statement.

Credit management

Set a credit limit on the customer and Ledgr tracks utilisation as invoices are issued and settled:

The limit is enforced, not only shown. Saving a draft is never refused — a draft owes nothing — but anything that makes the customer owe more than their limit is: sending a draft or marking it sent, raising a deposit, and editing an invoice that is already issued so that it asks for more. What they owe is counted in your base currency, so a dollar invoice counts at its exchange rate. The message gives both figures; raise the limit here, or record a payment against what they already owe, and try again.

An integration using the API can ask to raise a deposit over the limit. Only a role that may approve invoices can do that — Owner, Admin and Accountant, not Sales — and each time it happens the audit log records who did it, for which document, what the customer would owe and the limit it passed.

Duplicates, and archiving a contact

The same customer entered twice is the ordinary state of every address book that has ever been used by more than one person. Merge Duplicate on the contact detail view picks the record to keep and moves everything across to it (Merge Duplicates Into This folds several into the one you are looking at) — not just the invoices, but every place in Ledgr that points at a contact: quotes, bills, purchase orders, deals and activities, job cards, deliveries, supplier quotes and catalogues, compliance documents, service contracts, and the ledger's own subsidiary detail. The merge is recorded in the audit log with a count of what it moved.

A merge can be undone. Straight after it, a bar offers Undo. Later, open Archived from the Contacts menu: a merged-away contact is listed there with Undo Merge, which puts the contact back and moves back everything the merge moved. Each merge is undone on its own, so merging three duplicates and undoing one leaves the other two merged.

Deleting a contact is an archive: the record leaves your lists and its history stays intact, so an old invoice never loses the name it was addressed to. An archived contact is listed under Archived with Restore.

When a person asks what you hold, or to be removed

The privacy law (POPIA) gives a person the right to ask what you hold about them, and to ask for it to be removed. Both are on the contact, under Their personal information.

Download what we hold saves one file with their contact record, every record that names them — invoices, quotes, bills, deals, consent — and those records' lines. Nobody else's details are in it, so you can send it to them as it is.

Erase their details clears their name, email, phone numbers, addresses, bank details and notes, and withdraws their marketing consent on every channel. Your invoices and your books are kept, under an anonymised name, so your figures do not change. It needs a role that may delete contacts, and it is recorded in the audit log.

The customer portal

Each customer can be given a portal link — no account, no password. They see their documents and can pay through whichever gateway you have attached. Copy it with Customer Portal Link on the contact, or Copy Payment Link on an individual invoice.

Common problems