Add and manage customers

1:24

Add a Customer (1:24 video). Open on its own page

Add a customer

1. 1Go to Customers and click Add Customer (top right).
2. 2Fill in first and last name (required), phone, and email — both phone and email are required, since they power billing, texting, and the portal.
3. 3Optionally add service locations right on the form with Add Service Location — each with an address, notes, and photos. When an address needs confirming, a picker shows Google's matching candidates on a map before saving.
4. 4Left the page before clicking Create Customer? Nothing is lost: what you typed (service locations included) is saved as a draft on that computer or phone and comes back the next time you open the form, with a We restored the customer you were adding. notice. Click Discard draft to start over. A draft is kept for 24 hours, only on the device you typed it on, and is cleared once the customer is created. Closing or reloading the browser tab with an unfinished customer asks you to confirm first. The same applies to the setup guide's Add by hand form and to the mobile app's add-customer screens.
5. 5To bring in many customers at once, use Bulk Import (CSV, Excel, or even a screenshot of your old software) or Import from QuickBooks instead — see Import your customers.

Company name and display

The optional Company field pairs with a "Display as company instead of individual name" checkbox. Checked, the customer shows up everywhere under the company name (with the person's name kept underneath on their page) — right for HOAs, property managers, and commercial accounts.

Text message settings

• "Customer consents to receive SMS notifications" — checked by default, and the only text-related checkbox on the customer form. Covers service updates, appointment reminders, and technician arrival alerts. The same default applies to every other way a customer is added — the setup guide's quick-add, the mobile app's Create Customer screen, converting a lead, and CSV or QuickBooks import — so a customer only lacks consent if someone unchecked the box. See Texting and the Phone inbox.
• There is no longer a "Text when invoices are created" checkbox here. Which automated texts go out is a company-wide setting (Messages → Phone → Automated texts tab); a single customer's exception lives on their page as the Texts pill, below.

Email notifications, per address

The Email Notifications block lists the primary email with three checkboxes — Service Reports, Invoices, and Quotes (all on by default). Add Email adds extra addresses, each with its own three checkboxes, so a tenant can get service reports while the owner gets the invoices. New additional emails start with Service Reports on and Invoices/Quotes off. If several addresses are pasted into one email field (separated by commas), the first is kept in that field and the rest are saved as additional emails automatically — addresses split off the primary email get all three notification types turned on.

Notes and tags

Finish with an optional Note (it's saved as the first entry in the Notes section on the customer's Overview tab, with your name and the time, like any other note) and Tags — a combobox where you can pick existing tags or type a new one to create it on the spot. Tags also show (and can be edited inline) on the customer's page, and the Customers table can filter by them. Service locations have their own, separate tags (see service locations).

Parent and child accounts

The Parent Account section at the bottom of the customer form links a customer to a parent — an HOA, property manager, or landlord. Once a parent is selected, Relationship Settings control where everything routes:

• On the parent's page, linked customers appear under Child accounts on the Locations tab — each row shows its location count, open invoices, and billing target — with an Add child account button that opens the customer form with the parent pre-linked.
• A child's page header shows a Parent pill linking to the parent, plus a one-line summary of the four routing choices.
• Billing routed to the parent can also be bundled into one invoice per period — see Consolidated billing.

Quick add contact — create a customer from a work order

You don't have to create a customer record before writing a work order for someone new. On the work order form, open the Service Location dropdown and choose Quick add contact (at the bottom of the list).

• Enter an email or phone number plus the service address — a name is optional — then click Create Contact.
• A minimal customer and service location are created automatically, so invoicing, emails, and routes all work normally.
• If the email or phone already matches an existing customer, that customer is reused instead of duplicated.
• Fill in the rest of their details later on the customer's page.
• Technicians have the same Quick Add Contact button in the customer picker when creating a work order in the mobile app.

The customer page, tab by tab

Open any customer to see everything about them. The header shows the customer's name (or company), inline tags (add or remove them right there with the Add tag picker), and click-to-copy pills for their email addresses and phone number — one click copies the value to your clipboard. A portal-activity line tells you whether they've opened their customer portal — how many times, and when last — or "Hasn't opened the portal yet".

Under the header, tiles show Balance due, Lifetime revenue (paid invoices less refunds), Next visit, Open quotes awaiting a reply, and Open requests; click one to open its tab. Each tile shows only if your role can see that data.

The Texts pill

Next to the click-to-copy pills, a customer with a phone number gets a "Texts: Default" / "Texts: Off" / "Texts: Custom" pill. Click it to open Text preferences: their texting consent status (or the date they replied STOP), an Automated texts switch — off means this customer gets no automated texts at all — and a switch each for On the way, Invoice ready, Visit reminder, Service report ready, Review request, Deposit reminder, and Quote reminders. Turning the Automated texts switch off also leaves this customer out of text broadcasts. There is no Lead follow-up switch here: the Lead follow-up automation texts leads rather than customers, and is paused per lead on the lead's own Follow-ups card. Reset to default puts the customer back on your company settings. Editing needs the update-customers permission. This replaced the old "Invoice texts on/off" pill.

Below are seven tabs, one per kind of customer record; the open tab is kept in the page address, and a red number means something needs attention.

• Overview — quick-create actions for this customer (Recurring Service, Work Order, Quote, Location, Body of Water, Payment Method); Needs attention (open Technician Alerts, open requests, unpaid or overdue invoices, quotes awaiting a reply); Coming up, the next four visits; Recent activity, one timeline of visits, invoices, payments, quotes, requests, alerts, and messages; and notes.
• Locations — each of the customer's service addresses with its tags and access notes, and the pools and spas there with gallons and equipment. Parent accounts also see Child accounts here. See Service locations and pools.
• Jobs — the customer's recurring services, work orders (Open or Completed), and upcoming visits, with Add recurring service and Add work order buttons that open the job form with this customer already picked (see Create jobs).
• Quotes — every quote sent to the customer, with its status (Draft, Awaiting reply, Accepted, Declined, Expired) and total, plus New quote.
• Billing — invoices; Payments (card and bank payments, recorded check/cash payments, refunds, failed attempts, and tips); Payment Methods and AutoPay (see Accept online payments); Consolidated Billing; the billing address; and QuickBooks.
• Messages — Requests (from the portal, phone messages, or added by the office) with their status, and Communications: the last 50 texts, calls, portal messages, and emails, filterable by channel.
• History — the last 25 visits, Chemistry Trends, service photos, all Technician Alerts, Customer Profitability, and chemical usage.
• Notes (bottom of the Overview tab) — free-form notes about the customer, with photos, newest first; each note shows who wrote it and when. Add one with the box at the top of the section (or the note box on the customer form). These are internal: an Internal badge on the section (hover it for details) confirms they're visible to your office and to technicians in the field app (unless their role has View customer notes turned off, see who can see notes), but never to customers — they don't appear on service reports, invoices, quotes, or the customer portal. Service location pages have the same notes section and badge. On a job's page, one Notes card brings them together: a switch at the top shows All, Job, Customer, or Location notes (plus Progress on work orders, the updates technicians leave when they mark the work in progress), and the Add note box adds to whichever one is selected, or to the job under All. Archived jobs show only the job's own notes, read-only. Notes can't be edited, but they can be deleted: roles with the Delete notes permission (Owners, Administrators, and Office Managers by default, not Technicians) see a trash icon on each note, on the customer, location, and job pages and in the mobile app. Confirm Delete and the note and its photos are removed for everyone; there's no undo. Work order progress updates and the "From job setup" and "From customer setup" notes can't be deleted. The note a customer can see is the technician's visit note on a service report.

The Edit button opens the customer form for contact info. Editing needs only a phone number or an email, so a customer added with just one (from the Phone inbox, by George, or during setup) can be edited without making up the other; card billing and emailed invoices still need an email. Its Add a note box adds a new entry to the customer's Notes timeline, signed with your name and the time, when you save. Customers set up before notes were dated may have older notes: the form shows them read-only under Notes from customer setup, and they stay at the bottom of the Notes section marked From customer setup (they don't appear in a job's Notes card). Service addresses are not edited there — they're separate service-location records. Add one with the Location quick-create action on Overview, and edit them from the Locations tab.

If you run your own customer referral program, the profile header also has a Referred by… pill to record which existing customer referred this one (requires the update-customers permission). See Referral programs.

Billing address (when invoices go somewhere else)

Most customers are billed at the pool, so the customer record has no address of its own — the service location is the address. When invoices should be addressed somewhere else (an out-of-state owner, a property manager, a PO box), give the customer a billing address. It lives on the customer, not on a service location, and is never placed on a map.

1. 1Open the customer's page, go to the Billing tab, and find the Billing address section. Until one is set it reads Same as service address.
2. 2Click Edit, fill in the street, city, state, and ZIP (a PO box is fine — there is no map pin to confirm), and click Save.
3. 3To go back to billing at the pool, click Edit and then Use service address.
4. 4You can also set it while adding or editing a customer: the customer form has a Billing address (optional) section with an Add Billing Address button.

Look up a customer on the technician app

The mobile customer directory is gated on the Browse customer directory permission (`customers:list`). Owners, administrators, office managers, bookkeepers, and viewers have it by default; the built-in technician role does not. People with the permission see Customers in the Actions list at the bottom of the Today tab (the Today tab's actions sheet, under the Customers heading). Technicians still see contact info on the job they're servicing, and they can still pick a customer when creating a work order or quote, but they cannot open a searchable company directory. To give a custom field role the list, add this permission on Roles. The list also works offline: the app keeps a saved copy of every customer's name, phone number, and service addresses on the phone, so you can look someone up, call them, and navigate to their address with no signal. Opening a customer offline shows that saved info (plus anything viewed before); parent/child accounts, invoices, and photos load when you're back online.

• The search box at the top matches name, company, email, phone, notes, or service location address — the same search as the web Customers table.
• Tap a row to open that customer. The page scrolls top to bottom: contact, create buttons, what needs attention and coming up, then a list of sections (Locations, Jobs & visits, Quotes, Billing, Messages, History) that each open as their own screen, with a summary such as the balance due on each row. It shows what your role is allowed to see: contact (tap to call, text, or email), tags, notes, locations and their pools, jobs, quotes, payments, requests and messages, service history and photos, upcoming schedule. Invoices, lifetime revenue, outstanding balance, saved payment methods, and job/visit prices only appear if you have the view-invoices permission — a technician role never sees them.
• Technician Alerts, child accounts, and active projects appear when they exist and you have permission to view them. Project contract amounts are hidden without the view-invoices permission.
• The pencil in the header edits the customer (needs the update-customers permission). Create chips at the top start a recurring service, work order, quote, invoice, location, or body of water for this customer when you have those permissions.
• Creating or editing a customer on mobile exposes the same Email Notifications controls described above — the per-category toggles on the primary email, plus per-address toggles when you tap Add Email — so you can route which messages each address receives right from the phone.
• From a job's detail screen, tap the customer name to open the same page (same office-only gate).
• Adding a brand-new card, archiving a customer, and profitability are not on mobile — use the web dashboard for those.

Find customers in the table

• The search box matches name, company, email, phone, notes, or service location address — so "gate code 4411" or a street name finds the customer too.
• Click the Name, Company, or Contact column header to sort your whole customer list by it (not just the rows loaded so far); click again to flip the direction. Name sorts by the name the table shows (the company name for customers shown as a company), Company puts customers without a company first (A to Z), and Contact sorts by email address, or phone number when there is no email. The Service Locations column does not sort. The Sort menu (next to the search box) offers the same order plus dates: Name (A to Z) (the default), Name (Z to A), Newest first, or Oldest first (the date the customer was added). While you type in the search box, results are listed best match first, the headers stop sorting, and the menu reads Sort: Best match; clear the search to sort again. Your choice is kept in the page address, so it survives a reload or coming back from a customer.
• The Zip code or city box shows only customers with a service location in that area. Type a zip (or its first digits, like 336) or the start of a city name (tampa or Tampa both work). It matches service addresses, not billing addresses, and works together with search, tags, and sort. There is no filter by state or by radius/map area.
• The Filter by tags combobox narrows the list to customers carrying every selected tag. It filters your whole customer list, not just the rows already loaded.
• Texting status (next to the tag filter) — show one texting bucket only, such as No consent on file; the Who's reachable tiles on Automated texts open it for you.
• The Billing column and filter show who is on AutoPay, has a Saved method (AutoPay off), has No payment method, or is billed to a parent (Parent pays). Roles that can view invoices only.
• The Billing filter's Autopay card problem option lists customers on AutoPay whose next charge would fail or soon will: no saved AutoPay method (or it was removed), a card that has expired (a card is good through the end of its expiry month), or a card that expires this month. Each row gets a red No AutoPay method, Card expired, or Card expires this month badge in the Billing column; open the customer to email them a request for a new card. The to-do list's autopay card item opens this view.
• The Address filter's Not on the map option lists customers with a service address we couldn't place on the map, so it won't show on routes or the map. The address is marked Not on map · Fix in the Service Locations column; click it to open the location and correct the address. The to-do list's "addresses we couldn't find on the map" item opens this view.
• The Show Archived checkbox switches the table to archived customers, each with an Unarchive button.
• Click any address in the Service Locations column to preview it on a map in a modal — without leaving the table. Customers with no location yet show an Add Location button instead.
• The table loads more rows as you scroll; each row also has an inline Archive action.
• Export CSV downloads the customers the current filters show; see Export your customer list.
• Each row has a checkbox (the header checkbox selects every loaded row). Selecting rows shows a floating bar with the count and an Archive Selected button for archiving in bulk — handy after a QuickBooks or CSV import brings in customers you no longer service. With 2 to 10 rows selected, the bar also has Merge Selected for combining duplicates; see Merge duplicate customers.

Ask a customer to save a card or bank account by email

You never need to collect card numbers over the phone. The Add Payment Method dialog (from the customer's Overview or Billing tab, or the Add card button on the AutoPay row of a recurring service's Billing tab) has two tabs: Enter card — type the card in yourself — and Email customer, which sends a secure link where the customer saves their own card or bank account (no sign-in needed).

• The link expires in 7 days and can only be used once. Only the primary contact is emailed — additional emails on file don't receive it.
• The dialog shows the last request's status: when it was sent, and whether the customer saved a card, the link expired, or it's still active.
• When a customer has no payment methods yet, the empty Payment Methods section on the Billing tab offers the same thing as a one-click Email customer to save a card button (then Resend card request). Requests are rate-limited to one per hour.
• When entering a card yourself, an "Enable AutoPay with this card" checkbox enrolls it for automatic invoice payment in the same step. See Accept online payments.
• Whether the link offers a card, a bank account, or both follows the customer's Accepted payment methods on the Billing tab (Card or bank, Card only, Bank only).
• To ask many customers at once, use Request payment methods on the Customers page (or in the bar that appears when you select customers). You can edit the email, and each link lasts 30 days.
• Emailing one customer the link needs the Send invoices permission; the bulk Request payment methods needs Edit invoices.

Call a customer from your browser

A Call button appears next to the customer's phone number for users with the "Call customers as the business" permission, once your company has a business number. The same Call button is in the header of every text conversation in the Phone inbox, so you can call someone back straight from their thread. It places a real call from the browser (your computer's microphone and speakers, or a headset). The customer's caller ID shows your business number, or your own line if a number rings you. Calling from a text conversation that is on an additional line (for example a billing line) calls from that line, so the customer sees the number they texted. In call-forwarding mode, their caller ID shows the assistant's private line, not your published number. See Phone setup.

The call shows at the top of the phone panel in the bottom-right corner of every page (the same panel the phone icon in the top bar opens; see the phone panel), so you can keep working while you talk: open another customer's profile, build a quote, check the schedule. Moving between pages does not drop the call.

A Text button sits beside Call. To reach a customer without leaving what you are working on, both also sit on the customer card of a job's page, and as small icons next to the customer's name on each route stop. Text opens your text conversation with the customer in a panel on the side of the page: send, close it, and you are back where you were (Open in Phone inbox opens the full conversation). Text needs "Respond to inbox messages" and a business number that is registered for texting, with texting turned on.

• The card shows Calling…, then Ringing…, then On a call with a timer, the person's name and number, and Calling from with the number their caller ID shows.
• Mute turns your microphone off and on. The keypad button opens a dial pad for phone menus and extensions ("press 1 for…").
• Hold puts the call on hold (neither of you hears the other); Resume picks it back up.
• Hang up ends the call right away, even if the call has run into a problem. Reloading or closing the Pool Founder tab also hangs up.
• Open their profile takes you back to the customer you called.
• After the call the card shows Call ended with how long it lasted and a Call again button, then clears itself. If a call doesn't go through, the card says why (for example a busy line, or the browser blocking the microphone) and stays until you close it.
• You can be on one call at a time: hang up before calling someone else. While you are on a call you placed, incoming calls don't ring that browser; they still ring the rest of your team.

Archiving — and what about deleting?

To stop new quotes and jobs for a customer without archiving them, block them instead.

Customers — like jobs and routes — are archived, not permanently deleted. Archiving hides the record but keeps all of its history. Before anything happens, the archive dialog shows exactly what the archive will touch:

• A summary of what will be archived with it: their service locations, recurring services, and work orders, plus any pending quotes (which are cancelled).
• A warning listing how many jobs will be removed from routes, naming each affected route.
• A notice that AutoPay will be disabled if the customer has it on.
• A reminder of what is preserved: completed service records, paid invoices, and payment history all stay accessible for reporting and accounting.

Who can archive. Archiving and restoring a customer need the Archive and restore customers permission. Owners, Administrators and Office Managers have it by default; Bookkeepers, Technicians and Viewers do not. Without it, the Archive and Restore buttons on the customer page, the Archive and Unarchive buttons in the customers table, and Archive Selected are hidden, and George can't archive for them either. To let only admins archive, open Office Manager (or any other role) on the Roles & Permissions page, uncheck Archive and restore customers, and click Save Changes. Archiving a single service location is a separate switch, Archive and restore service locations (Technicians also have it by default); uncheck it as well.

To confirm, you type the customer's name exactly, then click Archive Customer. Archived customers keep a Restore button on their page (and an Unarchive button in the table's archived view).

Bringing a customer back. Click Restore on their page (or Unarchive in the archived view). A dialog lists what was archived with them, their service locations and services, with Also bring back what was archived with them checked. Confirming restores the customer, their service locations and services, and puts each service back where it was scheduled, in the same stop order and frequency. Uncheck it to bring back only the customer record. A service location or job you had archived on its own before archiving the customer stays archived.

To archive many customers at once, select them with the checkboxes in the customers table and click Archive Selected in the floating bar. One dialog previews the combined impact — no name typing per customer. Customers with unpaid invoices are skipped automatically (the dialog lists who and why) while the rest are archived.

Frequently asked questions

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