Customers and companies

Who you sell to and who you buy from. A company is a business: a trade customer, a supplier, or both. A person is someone you deal with: a retail customer, or a contact who orders or sells on a company's behalf.

Your trade accounts and suppliers are under Companies. Customers lists people: retail buyers, and the staff of your companies and suppliers.

People and companies

Companies: Businesses. Each has its locations (a name over a shipping and a billing address), the people who act for it, its payment terms, tax number and catalogs. Use a company for every wholesale account and every supplier.
People: Each person has one email address, and no two people in your organization share one. A person can be a contact at several companies.

Every company and person has one or both roles:

Customer: Buys from you. Can be chosen on a sales order or quote.
Supplier: You buy from them.

A purchase order is always placed with a company, so turn on Supplier for the company and add the people you deal with there as its contacts. Turning on Supplier for a person only adds the purchase orders of the companies they act for to their page.

Companies and people are never deleted. A company is archived; a person's personal data can be erased.

The Customers and Companies screens

Both are in the sidebar, under Quotes. Customers lists people, with their Email, Roles, Tags and when they were Created. Companies lists companies, with their Roles, how many Contacts and Locations each has, their Status and when they were Created.

Type in Search and filter to search people by name, email or phone, and companies by name or external id.

Both lists filter by Status, Role and Tag. Save the filters you use as a view. Archived companies are listed only when you filter by the archived status, and erased people only under erased.

Adding a company

On Companies, press Add company.
Under Details, type its Name. If you have them, add its External id (its number in your accounting or old system), its Tax number (ABN, VAT, EIN) and its Payment terms (days), such as 30.
Turn on Tax exempt if it is charged no tax. Add a Note for your staff if you like.
Under Roles, turn on Customer, Supplier or both. At least one is needed.
Add any Tags.
Under First location, press Add location to give it an address now, or add locations later on its page.
Press Save. The company's page opens.

A company's page

Details: name, external id, tax number, payment terms, tax exemption and note.
Orders, for a customer: every sales order, including ones from before Manifold, with what it has spent and been refunded in each currency, its Lifetime value in your home currency, and its first and latest order.
Locations: its addresses.
Supplier prices, for a supplier: what it charges for each SKU.
Contacts: the people who act for it.
Roles, Catalogs and Tags.
Record: its id, and when it was created and last updated.

Changes to details, locations, roles, catalogs and tags are saved together: the bar at the top offers Discard or Save. Contacts are saved the moment you change them.

Press Create order at the top to start a sales order for the company. For a supplier, Supplier payments opens what you have paid them.

Changing a company's details

On Companies, open the company.
Change the field under Details, such as its payment terms or tax number.
Press Save in the bar at the top.

The change applies to orders placed afterwards. Orders already placed keep what they were placed with.

Locations and addresses

A company location is one place the business takes deliveries or is billed: a head office, a warehouse, a second shop. Press Add location, or Edit on one, and fill in:

Location name, such as Head office or Shop 2.
Phone, and a Tax number if it differs from the company's.
The Shipping address. The Country code is two letters: AU, NZ, US.
Billing address is the same as shipping, or untick it and enter the billing address.
Catalogs for this location only (see Prices).
A Note, such as delivery instructions or opening hours.

Press Done, then Save in the bar. When you change or remove a location, the old version is kept under Previous versions, so orders placed with it still show the address they shipped to.

The country an order ships to decides how it is taxed. When an order goes to a company location, that location's country is used.

Contacts

On a company's page, under Contacts:

Under Add contact, choose the Person. If they are not listed, type their name or email and press New person, fill in their Email, First name and Last name, and press Add person.
Type a Job title if you like, such as Purchasing manager.
Tick Main contact if they are the company's main contact.
Press Add contact.

On each contact, Edit title changes their title, Make main makes them the main contact (a company has one at most, so the previous main contact stops being it), and Remove takes them off the company. Removing a contact does not delete the person.

Payment terms and tax

Payment terms (days) is how long the company has to pay. A company with payment terms gets its orders on account: they ship before they are paid. An invoice issued for one of its orders falls due that many days after it is issued.

Left empty, or set to 0, the company's orders take Default payment terms under Settings › Workflow. That is On account unless you change it, so an empty field does not make a company pay before its goods ship. To hold one company's orders until they are paid while your default stays on account, change the terms on each of its orders to Hold until paid. See Orders.

Payment terms and catalogs belong to companies; a person has neither. To sell on terms to a sole trader, add them as a company and make the person its contact.

Changing a company's terms affects orders placed after the change. Orders already placed keep the terms they were placed with.

Tax exempt on a company means its orders are charged no tax, and each line records why. A person's own Tax exempt setting is kept on their record, but does not change the tax on an order yet.

Prices for each customer

A company buys at the prices of the catalogs on its page. In the Catalogs card, choose a catalog, press Add, then Save. All of a company's catalogs are in one currency, so only catalogs in that currency are offered. A location can have catalogs of its own: tick them under the location's Catalogs.

An order you take in the admin is priced from one catalog. Choosing the company on a new order switches it to the first of the company's catalogs, and shipping to a location with catalogs of its own switches it to the first of those. You can pick another catalog. A company with no catalogs leaves the order on the catalog it started with.

An order that comes in through the API or a sales channel without naming a catalog is priced from all of them: the location's catalogs when it ships to one that has any, otherwise the company's. Each line takes the lowest price any of them gives, and a company with none buys at your Default catalog's prices.

Building catalogs, discounts and quantity breaks is covered in Catalogs and prices.

Supplier prices

On a supplier's page, Supplier prices lists what it charges for each SKU. Enter the SKU, Their code for it if it has one, the Cost and the currency, then press Set price. Setting a price for a SKU that already has one replaces it; Remove takes it off. A purchase order line raised without a cost takes the supplier's price for the SKU, if that price is in the purchase order's currency; otherwise the line needs a cost. See Purchase orders.

Adding a person

On Customers, press Add person.
Under Contact, type their Email. It is required, and a second person with the same email is refused. Add their name, Phone and Language (such as en-AU) if you have them.
Press Add address to give them an address, or add one later.
Add a Note for your staff. It is never shown to the person.
Under Roles, turn on Customer, Supplier or both.
Add any Tags, and set Tax & marketing.
Press Save.

To make them a contact at a company, add them from the company's page (see Contacts).

A person's page

What it shows:

Orders, for a customer: their sales orders, the company each was for, and their lifetime value. Purchase orders, for a supplier: the purchase orders placed with the companies they act for.
Companies: where they are a contact, with their title.
Timeline: every change to the person, and notes your staff leave. Type in Leave a note... and press Post. Each timeline note is a dated entry; the Note card is a single note you keep up to date.

Changing a person:

Contact information: press Edit contact information (the pencil) to change their first and last name, email, phone or language in Edit customer, and press Save there. A new email must not belong to anyone else.
Note: one standing note about them. Press Save note; the change shows on the timeline.
Addresses. Press Set default on their usual one. Changed and removed addresses are kept under Previous versions for the orders that used them.
Roles and Tags.
Tax & marketing: Tax exempt, and whether they agreed to Email marketing and SMS marketing: not-subscribed (never asked, or never agreed), subscribed, or unsubscribed (agreed, then withdrew). Manifold records their choice; it does not send marketing.

Addresses, roles, tags and tax and marketing settings are saved together through the bar at the top. Create order at the top starts a sales order for the person.

Archiving a company

Press Archive on the company's page. Save or discard any unsaved changes first. An archived company drops out of the lists and of every picker, so it cannot be chosen on a new order or purchase order. Its orders, contacts and history are kept, and its details cannot be changed.

To bring it back, filter Companies by the archived status, open it and press Restore.

Erasing a person's personal data

When someone asks you to delete what you hold about them, erase them. Their name, email, phone, note and addresses are destroyed for good, and cannot be brought back from a backup or an export. Their orders, and the companies they were a contact at, keep working and show Erased person.

Open the person, and under Danger zone press Erase personal data.
Type a Reason, such as the ticket number of the request. The reason is kept; it is about the request, not the person.
Type ERASE to confirm, and press Erase for good.

This cannot be undone. The record then shows as erased and takes no changes. Their email is free again: if they come back, register them as a new person, who shares nothing with the old record.

When a Shopify store asks for a customer's data to be removed, Manifold erases the person with the same email address for you.

Bringing customers in

To bring many companies and people in at once, import a spreadsheet. See Import & export. Connecting a Shopify store offers to copy its customers and companies. See Sales channels.

Before you go live

If Manifold is following your old system, customers and companies come from it. You can read them here but not change them until you go live. Erasing a person's personal data still works. See Going live.

Who can do it

Adding and changing people needs permission to change customers. Adding and changing companies, their locations, contacts and catalogs needs permission to change companies. The Wholesale rep, Purchasing, Merchandising and Data migration roles have both. Store can change people but cannot see companies. Fulfilment, Finance and Analyst can see both but change neither, and Receiving can see companies.

Setting supplier prices needs permission to change purchasing, which the Purchasing and Data migration roles have; Wholesale rep and Merchandising do not.

Only owners and admins can erase a person. Owners and admins can do everything. See Team.

For developers

A person, a supplier, and a right-to-erasure request — every call, with the facts each appends.
API: register a person, change a person, erase a person, register a company, change a company, set a contact, archive a company.
API: CRM Manager (people, companies, contacts, addresses)
Concepts: idempotency and retries, facts and the journal, ids, read-only mode and the mirror lock, paging.