WorkCustomers
Creating a Customer
How to create a customer record, including source, address, contact details, primary email, and additional email handling.
A good customer record saves time everywhere else in Work Planner. Jobs, quotes, invoices, payment links, SMS sending, and email sending all depend on the customer details entered here being useful and easy to trust.
Customer Information
- Reference: Use this when your team keeps its own customer code or account number. Leave it blank if you do not work that way.
- Customer Source: Choose where the customer came from if you track lead sources or referral channels. The list itself is managed from Customer Sources List.
- Team Member Source: This only appears when your setup has more than one user. Use it if the customer should be credited back to a specific team member or salesperson.
Name Fields
- Title, First Name, Last Name: Fill these in when the customer is mainly an individual.
- Company: Use this when the customer is a business, or when the company name is the main thing your team recognises.
- When to leave some name fields blank: It is fine to lean on the company field if that is how the customer is always known in real life.
Address
- Find Address: Opens the address lookup popup so you can pull in the full address instead of typing every line manually.
- Address Line 1: This is the one required address field. The customer record cannot be saved without it.
- Town, County, Postcode: Fill these in if you are typing manually, because route planning, billing, and customer communications work better with a complete address.
Contact Information
- Phone and Mobile: Use these for day-to-day communication. The mobile number is especially useful for SMS reminders and update messages later.
- Primary Email: This is the default customer email address used elsewhere in the app.
- Additional Emails: Add these when invoices, quotes, or updates sometimes need copying to other people.
- Make primary: Use this if one of the additional email addresses should become the main address instead.
- Email rule: If you add extra email addresses, Work Planner expects a primary email address to be set as well.
- Website: Useful for quick reference, but not required for normal customer flows.
How They Like to Be Contacted
- Contact by: Email, Text or No preference. When a message or automation goes by email or text, whichever the customer can get, it tries their preferred way first.
- Don’t email: Tick this when they’ve asked not to get emails. Nothing is emailed to them, and messages that can go either way are texted instead.
- Don’t text: Tick this when they’ve asked not to get texts. If they reply STOP to one of your texts, this is ticked for you and says when they replied. Replying START, or unticking it, lets you text them again.
- Don’t send invoices automatically: Tick this for customers who’d rather have their invoices another way, such as printed. An automation that sends new invoices leaves them out. You can still email them an invoice yourself.
What Happens After Save
- Status starts as active: New customers default into live use straight away.
- Next, add a job: A customer on their own puts nothing on your planner or worksheets - their job does. So after you add a customer from Work > Customers, a popup suggests doing that next. Add a job opens the job popup with the customer already filled in, Show me how starts the Adding your first job tour, and Not now closes it. Tick Don't show this again if you would rather not see it after each new customer. The popup only appears if your account can add jobs, and not when you add the customer from inside the job popup, since you are already making their job there.
- The customer becomes available immediately: You can select the customer from jobs, quotes, worksheets, invoices, and communication flows as soon as the record has saved.
- Future payment setup depends on this data: If you plan to use GoCardless later, a clean address and a real email address make that setup much smoother.
Related articles
- Editing a Customer: Explains the extra fields that appear once the customer already exists.
- Creating a Job from the Dashboard: A common next step once the customer record is in place.
- Customer Detail View: Shows what you can review after the customer has been saved.
- Creating a Quote: another common next step once the customer record exists.
- Billing Request and Direct Debit Setup Flow: Useful if the customer will later be set up for GoCardless.