Manage contacts

Contacts holds the customers you sell to and the vendors you buy from, with their addresses. A contact can be a customer, a vendor or both.

Add a contact

1. Open Contacts, then use New contact at the top of the page.
2. Enter the Name.
3. Under Roles, select Customer, Vendor or both.
4. Add an Email and Phone if you have them.
5. Select Create contact.

Biosphere gives the contact a reference that can be used to find it. For example, Alder Retail as a customer, or Northfield Ceramics as a vendor.

Find a contact

Type a name or reference in Search by name or reference… at the top of Contacts. The list shows 20 contacts a page with their reference, status and when they last changed.

Edit a contact

1. Open the contact from Contacts.
2. Select the property you want to change.
3. Enter its new value and leave the field. A brief Saved check confirms the change.

Press Enter to save a single-line value or Escape to cancel. A failed save keeps your draft beside its error. If another person changed the record, load the latest record and review your change before saving again.

You can also change Status and Roles directly in their table cells. The choices are the same as in the contact sidebar. Each choice saves immediately.

Add an address

1. Open the contact.
2. Under Addresses, select New address.
3. Enter Address line 1 and the Country code, such as US or GB. Add a Label such as Warehouse or Billing, and any other lines, city, region and postal code.
4. Select Create address.

To change an address, select a property in its address row. Changes save when you leave the field, with the same Saved confirmation as the contact.

Add a contact while creating an order

In an order’s Customer or Vendor field, type the contact’s name. When no contact matches, the list offers to create one with that name. Fill in the rest, including the right role, and save it; the order uses the new contact.

What to know

• A sales order’s customer must have the Customer role, and a purchase order’s vendor must have the Vendor role. Biosphere refuses the order otherwise; add the role to the contact first.
• You can’t remove the Customer role from a contact that has sales orders, or the Vendor role from one that has purchase orders.
• Contacts and addresses can’t be deleted. Set a contact’s Status to archived when you stop working with it; its orders keep it.
• Names can be up to 300 characters and email addresses up to 320.
• The contact’s Activity lists every change to it and its addresses. See Read a record’s Activity.