Customers and vendors
Tamra calls them partners: a customer, a vendor, or both. Customers live under Sales → Customers, vendors under Purchase → Vendors, but it's one record — a business you both buy from and sell to is one partner marked Both, with one statement that shows both sides.
Creating a partner
Sales → Customers → New (or Purchase → Vendors → New). The record has more fields than you'll need on day one; the ones marked here as start with are enough to send a quotation or enter a bill.
| Field | Start with | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Type | ✓ | Customer, Vendor, or Both. Decides which lists the partner appears in and which documents can be raised against it. |
| Name | ✓ | The legal name, as it appears on their documents and yours. |
| Display name | A shorter or familiar name for lists and search. Documents print the legal name. | |
| Email · Phone · Mobile · Website | ✓ | The email is where quotations, invoices, statements and payment links go. |
| Whether the customer agreed to receive WhatsApp messages from you, and when. Open the customer → Edit → Contact → Record agreement (Tamra asks you to confirm first); Withdraw removes it. It's needed before messages from your WhatsApp Business number, such as invoice reminders. | ||
| TRN | Their tax registration number. Printed on tax invoices; required for e-invoicing. | |
| Contact person | The person you deal with; printed as Attention on documents. | |
| Address · Shipping address | ✓ | Billing address prints on documents; shipping address prints on deliveries when it differs. |
| Currency | The currency documents for this partner default to. Leave blank for your base currency. | |
| Payment terms | Days until due (e.g. 30). New invoices and bills compute their due date from it. | |
| Credit limit | For customers: when a new invoice would push the customer's open balance past this, the editor warns before posting. Empty means no limit. | |
| Price list | For customers: the list Tamra prices their lines from first. See Products and pricing. | |
| Default warehouse | For customers: where their deliveries ship from. | |
| Bank details | For vendors: printed on remittance advices and payment vouchers. | |
| Category · Tags · Rating · Notes | Yours to organise with. Notes are never printed. | |
| Peppol endpoint | For e-invoicing over the Peppol network where it applies. | |
| Active | Inactive partners stay on every historic document but disappear from pickers. |
Save. The partner is immediately available in the customer or vendor picker of every document.
The partner page
Open a partner and two tabs appear.
Overview shows the relationship at a glance: total sales or purchases, what's open, an aging breakdown of the open balance (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90 days), and the most recent documents with their status. Three shortcuts sit at the top — New Quote, New Invoice for customers, New RFQ for vendors — each opening a fresh document with the partner already filled in.
Statement is the running account: every invoice, credit note, bill, debit note, payment and refund in date order with a running balance, filterable by date range. A discount after tax shows as its own Discount row under its invoice. On a vendor's statement, a prepayment not yet applied to a bill is money the vendor holds for you: it takes off what you owe. Print produces a statement to send; Email sends it to the partner's email with the PDF attached. This is what you send when a customer asks "what do we owe you?" — and what you check when a vendor's statement doesn't match yours.
Click a partner in the list to open its side panel instead: Details, Addresses, Knowledge (notes and Scribe pages about them), Reminders (see Working together) and, for customers, Portal — where you give them access to the Customer Portal.
Currency and terms in practice
- A partner with a currency set gets documents in that currency by default; each document still shows its exchange rate, which the user can change before posting.
- Payment terms feed the Due Date on invoices and bills, and the Agenda on the home screen reads those due dates. Overdue status turns on the day after the due date.
- Balances on the partner page, in aging and in statements are shown in your base currency, converting each document at its own rate — so a customer with invoices in two currencies has one honest total.
Credit control
Set a credit limit on customers who buy on account. When an invoice is about to be posted and the customer's open balance plus this invoice would exceed the limit, the Post confirmation says so — what they owe, with this invoice, against the limit, and how much is overdue. It doesn't block: the decision is yours. What they owe counts every open invoice less open credit notes, in your company's currency at each document's rate; a limit kept in the customer's currency is converted the same way. Reports → A/R Aging lists every customer's open balance by age; the Overdue number on the home screen is the same figure for the whole company.
Sharing partners across a group
Companies in the same group (see Data Sharing in Settings) can share partners. A shared customer or vendor is created once, in the owning company, and appears in the others with a small badge — shared with your group by another company — usable on documents there, editable only by its owner. Balances and statements stay per company: sharing the record does not share the debt.
Intercompany partners
If two of your own companies trade with each other, link the partner to the other company (the linked company on the record). Posting an invoice to a linked partner then creates and posts the matching bill in the other company in one step, and consolidated reports can eliminate the internal sale, and the advances one company paid the other. Intercompany is a chapter of its own in Books.
Searching and organising
The list pages search on name, display name, email, phone and TRN; the global search (⌘K) finds partners by any of those from anywhere. Use Category for how you group them (retail, wholesale, government), Tags for anything else, and the Active switch instead of deleting.
Common questions
Can I delete a customer? Only if nothing has ever been raised against them. Otherwise deactivate: documents keep their history and the customer leaves the pickers.
We sell to and buy from the same company. Two records? One, marked Both. The statement shows invoices and bills together; if you settle net, record the payment on one side and the credit on the other, or offset through a journal entry — your accountant will have a preference.
The customer changed their TRN / address. Edit the partner. Documents already posted keep the details they were posted with, which is what an auditor expects; new documents print the new ones.
Why does the statement total differ from what the customer shows? Almost always a payment they sent that you haven't matched yet — check Books → Bank Reconciliation for unmatched lines — or a credit note on one side only.
Can a customer see their own statement? Yes — give them a link to the Customer Portal from the customer's Portal tab, and they can see their statement, invoices and documents whenever they like, and pay online. See The Customer Portal. You can still email the statement as a PDF from the Statement tab.
If something goes wrong
- A partner is missing from the invoice's customer picker → its Type is Vendor, or it's inactive. Edit the record.
- The due date on new invoices is wrong → the partner's payment terms; the invoice's due date can also be changed by hand before posting.
- Aging doesn't add up to the statement → aging counts only posted, unpaid documents; the statement shows everything including drafts you may have filtered in. Compare with the Open filter on.