Contacts: the shared address book

You’ll need: Contacts — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Contacts is the single list of people and organisations your business deals with. Customers, suppliers, members — one module, one record per party.

One record, many roles

The instinct from other systems is to keep customers and suppliers apart. FeePrime does not, and the reason becomes obvious the first time somebody is both. A printer you buy paper from and also sell services to is one business with one phone number and one address, and keeping two half-records of them means updating an address twice and missing it once.

Because there is one record, an invoice, a purchase order and a membership can all point at the same contact, and that contact’s history holds the lot.

Every contact has a code

Contacts carry a short reference code, generated for you. You do not have to invent one, and you should not overwrite one. It is what other documents quote when they need to name this party unambiguously — helpful when two customers genuinely share a name.

Search before you create — every time

The most common damage anyone does to a FeePrime database is creating a contact that already exists.

   Ndiaye, Awa
   Awa Ndiaye
   AWA NDIAYE
   A. Ndiaye

Four records, one person. Now their purchase history is split four ways, their outstanding balance is wrong on all four, and nobody can answer how much they owe. Nothing in the system will flag this, because to a computer those are four different pieces of text.

Search first. Search matches partial words, so two or three letters of a surname is enough — you do not need to guess how a colleague spelled it. Only create when you are satisfied it is genuinely somebody new.

Note that archiving does not help you here. Archiving a duplicate cleans the list, but the documents already attached to the wrong copy stay attached to it. Prevention is the whole of the cure.

Contacts are shared

Everyone works from the same address book. A phone number you correct is corrected for the whole business, and a duplicate you create is a duplicate for the whole business. Treat it as shared property, because it is.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, deliberately create two contacts for the same imaginary person with slightly different spellings, then try to work out from the list alone which one anybody should use. That mild frustration is exactly what your colleagues will feel in two years, and it is the most persuasive argument for searching first.