Client / Contact Questions

[majeztic]

I do not necessarily need both a client AND contact record.  I wish there was some way to merge the two or just have one or the other.  The current process for creating customers in the backend involves creating a client, then a contact (to associate a joomla user with it).   This process really complicates what should be a simple customer list. 

If I create a contact first, then I have to enter the address again on the client tab otherwise the address will not appear on quotes and invoices.  If I create a client record first, the only information that gets entered on the client tab is the address, then I have to go to the contact tab to enter the rest of the "customer" details.

I understand that many nBill users may use this feature, so I am not saying that it is unnecessary.  In fact, I think that the development of this feature is excellent and works very well (for those that need it).  However, it would be helpful to have the option to use a single customer database so that it will simplify the customer area for those that don't use (or need) to create client-contact relationships.

Using nBill as it is, I have considered using "client" to describe the property and "contact" as the person; meaning that (for the few customers I have that have multiple properties) I could use "client" to mean "home", "rental 1", "rental 2" etc.  This way, when a customer fills out an order form, I could have a "billing address" mapped to the contact fields and a "job location" mapped to the client fields.  However, (this applies only to new customers) I would not want to make customers enter their address twice - since most customers have a matching billing and job location address.  Is there any way to automatically populate the job location fields with the billing address fields on the fly when a user is filling out an order form?  Essentially, it is just a typical "shipping / billing address the same?" checkbox type of thing. 

Additionaly, I have noticed that if a contact is assigned to two or more clients, there will be a drop-down to select the appropriate client record when filling out an order form- is it possible to get that line into the order form itself and not above it (where it could possibly be overlooked)?   

Lastly, I noticed that there is a client tab on the user profile in the frontend.  Is this a feature from the recent release?  Can this be turned off?

Any thoughts? 

[netshine]

Thanks for the feedback. As you are hopefully aware, there is a button on the contact tab that allows the address to be copied from the client record to the contact record. All the other data for a contact is not applicable to a client record, so you would have to enter that separately anyway - even if it all appeared on one tab. So as far as I can see the only 'problem' is that you have to click on a new tab to enter the rest of the data. Whilst I like to avoid unnecessary mouse clicks, the additional functionality that comes from keeping contacts separate seems worth the single extra click needed to populate the contact record. Allowing the 2 pages to be merged into one would be quite a lot of work for very little benefit (ie. just saving a single click).

In theory, a client would represent a company, and a contact represents a person within that company - often when dealing with companies you have more than one contact in a company to deal with. Also, if a person has more than one client account (eg. they run 2 separate businesses), they can have a single user/email associated with both clients by sharing the same contact record. You probably guessed all that, but I'm just clarifying the reason for distinguishing between clients and contacts.

At present if you wanted to allow the user to choose whether or not to copy values from fields mapped to a contact into fields mapped to a client, the only way to do it would be to add some custom javascript to the form. If you want to force a value to be assigned to both client and contact, you can of course just map the field to both client and contact.

The client dropdown that appears where a contact is assigned to more than one client is of course essential in determining who to assign orders to. As the content of an order form is very flexible and left entirely up to the administrator, I was keen to avoid adding it to the form editor where it could get deleted. However, it might not be too difficult to allow the option of moving the field down below the form intro HTML. I will move this topic to the suggestions board for considering this in a future release (it won't be in the next release though).

The client tab in the front-end has been there since version 2.0 - ie. when the client/contact distinction was introduced. It only appears if a contact belongs to more than one client, or if the client address is different to the contact address. In cases where there is a one-to-one relationship between client and contact, it merges all the fields into a single list. I guess this is the kind of thing you would like to see in the back end too, but it was a pain in the neck to develop!

[majeztic]

Thank you for the detailed reply.  You addressed most of my concerns.

I guess, in reality, you are correct in saying that "the only 'problem' is that you have to click on a new tab to enter the rest of the data".  I was probably over complicating the issue, and just trying to simplify things a bit.  One of the reasons I chose to use nBill to handle my invoicing was because I wanted to be able to easily create invoices and quotes for customers while on site or immediately after leaving their home.  My concern arose when I created an invoice for a customer while in a her home on my smart phone.  I started out creating a new contact, then went to the client tab, and had to re-enter the address (the 'copy address' button doesn't work both ways).  Then (overlooking the 'create new user' option in the dropdown) I had to exit nBill to create a user in Joomla so that it would appear in the contact drop-down list.  I had to then go back into the contact record to add the user.  This caused some frustration but, honestly, it was probably just due to having to deal with a small screen and my lack of real-world experience with nBill.

Also, I was testing some various options with clients / contacts and changed the client address; that must be why the tab showed up.  Thanks for clarifying.