Organisations, customers and sites

Three different things, and which is which

Your customer records have three kinds of entry in them:

• A customer is a person. John at Building Co. They have a name, an email address and a phone number, and jobs belong to them.
• An organisation is the firm behind them. Building Co itself. This is optional. A homeowner doesn't belong to a firm, and that's fine.
• A site is a place you go to. 12 Bath St. It belongs to the firm if there is one, and to the person if there isn't.

This matters because offices usually think in firms and buildings, not people. If four people at Building Co email in about the same building, all four jobs are Building Co's jobs at 12 Bath St, not four separate requests from four people who happen to share an address.

What happened to my customer list

Nothing was taken away. Every customer you had is still there, with every job they've raised. What's new is a second tab next to them, Organisations, and a firm on each customer's record, which starts out empty. Until you put someone under a firm, nothing changes for them.

Anyone in the company can look up a customer, a firm or a site, because a technician at the door needs the phone number as much as the office does. Only an administrator can change them, because these records feed into reporting.

Filing people under a firm

Open Organisations and press New organisation. A small form asks for four things: name, email, phone and notes. When you save, you're taken straight to the new firm's page. There, the People card has a search box. Type a name, email address or phone number, and pick the person.

Filing someone under a firm only sets the firm on their record. Their jobs stay the same, and so do the sites they already had. If you take them back out of the firm, they keep everything too. The search also shows people who are already at another firm, with that firm named beside them, so you can move someone who was put in the wrong one.

The firm shows on the customer's own page, under their name, as a link to the firm. You can't change it from there. You add and remove people on the firm's page, which is also where you'll see what that affects: its people, its sites and its portal access.

The firm's page brings together everything its people have: everyone at the firm, their open job counts, the firm's sites, and every job anyone there has raised. The counts in the list of organisations are links, so you can click "4 open jobs" to see which four.

Where sites come from

Usually you don't need to create sites yourself. When a job comes in with an address, WorkOrders looks it up. If a matching site already exists, the job is linked to it. If not, a new site is created. That way you don't have to retype the same building every week.

There are two things to know about how the matching works.

What counts as the same address

Capitals, spacing and punctuation are ignored, so 12 Bath St, 12 bath st and 12 Bath St. are all the same place. Punctuation is treated as a space, so 12/14 Bath St matches 12 14 Bath St, but 1214 Bath St (a different street number) is a different place. Different spellings aren't matched, though. "Bath St" and "Bath Street" are treated as two separate sites.

The address your customer wrote is never changed. It's kept on the job exactly as they wrote it, next to the link to the site.

Who the site belongs to

A new site belongs to the firm, if the person who asked belongs to one. That means four people at Building Co emailing about the same building share one site, rather than each getting their own. A customer who isn't part of a firm owns their own sites.

One thing to expect: if you move a customer into a firm later, they keep the sites they already had. The firm's page shows both the firm's own sites and the ones still held by its people, but they're still stored separately.

Managing sites by hand

There's a Sites card on each customer's page and each firm's page. There isn't a separate Sites section in the sidebar, because a site only makes sense alongside whoever owns it.

Add site asks for an address, and also has a Label field, a suburb, a city and a postcode. The hint under the label says What the office calls it: "Head office", "Shop 1". Optional. If a site has a label, that's what you'll see when you pick it from a list. If not, you'll see the address. If you add a site on John's page while John is at Building Co, the site goes to Building Co, for the reason above.

If you add an address the owner already has, WorkOrders won't add it again or merge it. It shows "That address is already saved as a site: Head office." You also can't delete a site while any job is linked to it: "That site has 3 work orders on it, so it can't be deleted. Move those jobs to another site first." A completed job's address is part of the record of the work, so deleting a site can't remove it from those jobs.

Merging two customers who are the same person

When customers are added from incoming email, the same person often ends up in the list several times. John might appear as john@building.test, j.marsh@building.test and "John Marsh". The Merge duplicates card on a customer's page lets you combine them.

The customer whose page you're on is the one that's kept. Search for the duplicate by name, email or phone, and add as many as you need. It's common for one person to have four old addresses. Then press Review merge. The confirmation lists every record that will be deleted by name, so you can check each one.

You might not need to search at all. The card also suggests duplicates it has spotted, and says why it suggested each one. That might be the same phone number (however it was typed), the same email domain (ignoring common ones like Gmail), or a very similar name. For example, "John Marsh" and "Jon Marsh" are suggested, but "John Marsh" and "John's Cafe" aren't. It only suggests. It never merges anything by itself.

What a merge actually does

• Every job the duplicate had moves to the customer you're keeping. Each job's timeline gets an entry saying so, naming the record it came from, so you can always see that a merge happened.
• The duplicate's sites move too. If you already have a site at the same address, they're combined, so you don't end up with 12 Bath St twice.
• If the customer you're keeping has no firm and the duplicate has one, the kept customer takes on that firm. That way, tidying up duplicates never quietly removes someone from their firm.
• If both have a firm, the kept customer keeps its own. You can sort out which firm is right afterwards, from the firms' own pages.
• The duplicate is deleted.

It can't be undone. The screen tells you "You can't undo this.", and that's true. The duplicate is deleted, not hidden. If you pick several duplicates, they're merged together in one go. Either they all merge or none do, so you never end up half-merged.

What a firm's portal user sees

This is the part most likely to surprise someone. A customer who belongs to a firm sees every job raised by anyone at that firm in their portal, not just their own. John and Andy at Building Co see the same list. A customer who isn't part of a firm only sees their own jobs.

So putting people under a firm decides who can see whose jobs. Think about it before you do it. For example, two households that share a property manager shouldn't be one organisation.

There are two separate portal switches. On a firm's page, you can revoke access for everyone at the firm at once. On a customer's page, you can revoke access for just that person. Restoring access for the firm doesn't restore anyone you revoked individually, and the message you see says so: "Portal access restored. Anyone you revoked individually still can't get in." Both switches also cancel any access links already sent, so an email sent five minutes ago stops working.

For the rest of the portal (the two kinds of link, what customers can and can't do there, and letting them raise requests), see the customer portal.

Where a firm shows up elsewhere

Sites and firms are part of every job. You can pick or correct the site on a job, an administrator can move a job to another customer or address, and a saved report can include the site as a column. See reports and saved views.