Find your footing

Create the customer you are quoting

Why this step

Everything downstream — the quotation, the site survey, the invoice — hangs off this record, so it is worth getting the address and contact right once.

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What this does

Creates the customer record every quotation, order, delivery and invoice will point at. Ten minutes here is what stops a window being delivered to a billing address six months later.

Before you start

Search before you create. A duplicate customer splits the history, the statement and the credit picture in two — try a phone number, a tax ID or part of the email before clicking New.
Have the tax registration number and the site address to hand if this is a company you will invoice.

Steps

A company customer form: Person/Company choice, name, email, address, Tax ID, language and tags, with a contact person card on the Contacts tab and the sales history in the smart buttons above

01
Open the Contacts app and click New.
02
Choose Company for a developer, contractor or business; choose Person for a private client.
03
Enter the name exactly as it should appear on an invoice — it is the only field the form insists on, so everything else is discipline, not enforcement.
04
Fill in Email and Phone — these are what the portal invitation and the order emails use. The phone number reformats itself to international form (+974 …) as you leave the field.
05
Enter the address, and set Language to the one this customer should receive documents in — it drives the quotation PDF, the portal and every email.
06
Add the Tax ID if they are registered.
07
Save.

Site addresses and contact people

A project rarely goes where the invoice goes. On the Contacts tab, click Add Contact and pick the Address Type:

Delivery — the site. WindoorERP picks this address for the order silently: no address field appears on the quotation form, so this record is the only place the site address is set.
Invoice — the accounts department.
Contact — a person: the site engineer, the procurement manager.
Other — anything else worth keeping.

Example

A contractor has one company record, an invoice address at their head office, and three delivery addresses — one per tower. Each quotation picks the right delivery address, and the installation crew's paperwork carries it.

Terms that follow the customer

On the Sales & Purchase tab, set what should apply automatically to every future order: the Salesperson, the Payment Terms, and the Pricelist that decides their prices. Setting them once here beats remembering them on every quotation — and note that when no salesperson is set here, a new quotation assigns whoever creates it.

Field	What it does
Name	Prints on every document. The only required field.
Email / Phone	Portal invitation and order emails; the phone is normalised to international format on entry.
Language	The language of this customer's PDFs, portal pages and emails.
Tax ID	The tax registration printed on invoices. Free text — check it yourself.
Salesperson / Payment Terms / Pricelist	Defaults copied onto every new order for this customer.
Tags	Free classification — Contractor, Credit Approved — for filters and reports.

Creating a customer from the quotation itself

Typing a new name in a quotation's Customer field offers Create (a name-only record to fix up later) and Create and edit… (the proper form in a dialog). The compact dialog asks for little — but there, unlike the full form, the Email is required. Typing a few letters of a company name may also offer enriched suggestions from the autocomplete service; take them as a starting point, not as verified data.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause and fix
The portal invitation cannot be sent	The contact has no email. Portal access hangs off the email address — fill it in first.
The phone number stayed exactly as typed	It could not be parsed as a real number for the country, so it was left alone. Re-enter it with the country code.
Documents render in the wrong language for this customer	The contact's Language field decides — set it to Arabic for an Arabic-reading customer and re-print.
The delivery went to the billing address	The customer has no Delivery-type child address, so the main address was used. Add one on the Contacts tab; the order picks it up silently.

Common mistakes

Creating a second contact because a search for "Al Rayyan" returned nothing — try a phone number, a tax ID, or part of the email before clicking New.
Typing the site address over the main address instead of adding a Delivery child. The invoice then goes to the site.
Leaving the language empty for an Arabic-speaking customer.
Putting a person's name on a company record, so the invoice is addressed to an individual who cannot pay it.

Checkpoint

The customer appears when you start typing their name in any Customer field.