Customers, Suppliers, Practice Locations, and the Practice itself all can have 'Contacts' defined.

The screen shots below are taken from the Customer Edit screen (and hence the other tabs).

There are four types: Email, Location, Phone and Fax.  The entity can have zero, one or more of each type of contact. Each contact can be set as the default contact for each type, and each can be given 'purposes'.

The available purposes are set via Administration|Lookups|Contact Purpose. Each contact can have zero, one or more purposes. In general these are just for information purposes. However, in two cases they are very important. As discussed in Reporting|Reminders, the system looks for a contact with the purpose 'Reminder' in order to decide how to send out reminders. Similarly, as discussed in Reporting|Debtors, the system looks for an email contact with the purpose 'Billing', and if found emails the customer's statement rather than printing it.
To set the purpose(s) use the arrows to move the selected item from the Available list to the Selected list and vice versa.

 

For Email contacts:


The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Email Address' but you modify it to anything more useful
Email Address - the email address - note that this is not checked to be valid - if you get it wrong, you won't know until an email that you send to the address results in a failure message to the sender
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred email address. Note that the system will not object if you set two preferred email addresses - if will just use the first one it finds.

 

For Location contacts:


The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Location' but you modify it to anything more useful
Address - as discussed in Concepts|Addresses this can either be the address lines (not including the suburb etc) or a complete address including the country
Suburb - choose the suburb from the pull-down list - those available are set via Administration|Lookups|Suburb. For international addresses, use 'None'.
Postcode - enter the postcode/zip code
State - choose the state from the pull-down list - those available are set via Administration|Lookups|State. For international addresses, use 'None'.
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred location. Note that the system will not object if you set two preferred locations - if will just use the first one it finds.

 

For Phone contacts:


The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Phone Number' but you modify it to anything more useful
Area Code - the area code part of the phone number
Telephone Number - the phone number
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred phone number. Note that the system will not object if you set two preferred phone numbers - if will just use the first one it finds.
Allow SMS - check this box if SMS is possible via this number. Note that if you flag multiple numbers as SMS capable, then when you send a SMS, there will be a pull-down list to select the required number.

 

For Fax contacts:
Note that the system cannot send faxes - this information is just for documentation purposes.

The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Fax Number' but you modify it to anything more useful
Area Code - the area code part of the fax number
Fax Number - the fax number

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