Adding a customer account

Create the customer-account record that an appointment, a contract, and any future work will hang off of — Internal ID, customer type, people, addresses.

Where this lives: Customers → Customer accounts → New customer
For: Admin
Manager
Sales
Customer Care

Why this matters

The customer account is the spine of every appointment that comes after it. Phone numbers, email addresses, signing authority, billing addresses, job-site addresses, and the customer's history with your company all live on the account — not on the appointment. When the account is set up cleanly, every contract, every job-information sheet, and every follow-up call has the right information without anyone having to re-enter it.

A customer account also outlives any single job. A residential customer may come back five years later for a different project; a commercial customer may have a project queue running constantly. In both cases the account carries the relationship — same people, same addresses, same contact preferences — and the appointment under it is just the current job.

Step 1 — Open the new-customer form

From the home screen, open Customers to see the customer table. There are three ways to start a new customer account:

Tap + New customer in the top right of the table.
Tap the + icon to the left of the search bar at the top of the table.
On macOS or iPad with a keyboard, press ⌘ + N.

All three open the same form. There's no separate "quick add" — every new account goes through the same fields so nothing important gets skipped.

Screenshot coming soonMac — New customer button and the empty form/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-01-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — New customer button and the empty form/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-01-ipad.png

Step 2 — Internal ID (optional)

The first field at the top of the form is Internal ID — a free-text field that ties this Bidvio account to a record in your own CRM, ERP, or job-management system. If your team uses a numeric or alphanumeric ID outside Bidvio (a quote number, an opportunity ID, a customer code), enter it here.

The Internal ID:

Appears on the generated contract, so the production team can cross-reference it with the system they actually run jobs out of.
Makes the account searchable by ID from the customer table — useful when someone calls and gives you their internal number rather than their name.

Leave it blank if you don't have a system that issues IDs. It's optional and you can always come back and fill it in later.

Screenshot coming soonMac — Internal ID field and where it lands on the contract/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-02-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — Internal ID field and where it lands on the contract/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-02-ipad.png

Step 3 — Customer type (Residential or Commercial)

The next control is Customer type — a two-option picker, Residential or Commercial. Pick the one that describes who's buying the work.

The current effects of this choice:

Reporting. Residential and commercial work tend to behave differently — different sales cycles, different margin profiles, different repeat behaviour — so segmenting them at the account level lets a manager pull cleaner numbers later.
Naming. A residential account is automatically named after its primary person (the one with the Primary contact toggle on, set in Step 4). A commercial account can be named after the company itself, in addition to the primary person, so the legal entity reads cleanly on the contract.

Future versions of the contract will tailor different sections to residential vs. commercial work; for now, treat this as a reporting and naming control.

Screenshot coming soonMac — Customer type picker/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-03-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — Customer type picker/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-03-ipad.png

Step 4 — Add the people on the account

Under People is the list of human contacts on this account — every person Bidvio should know about for this customer. Most residential accounts have one or two; commercial accounts often have several (a primary buyer, a project manager, an accounts-payable contact, a site contact).

To add a person:

Tap + Add Person to the left of the people search.
The Person form opens. Fill in First Name, Last Name, and optionally a Relationship to Account ("Owner", "Project Manager", "Spouse", "Tenant" — short labels that help the next rep understand who they're talking to).
Phone numbers. Add as many phone numbers as you want for this person. Each phone has a label (Home, Mobile, Work — drawn from the phone types your company has configured) and a yellow star. The number with the yellow star filled in is the primary phone — it's the number that appears on the contract and that the rest of the account treats as default. Tap a different phone's star to change which one is primary.
Email addresses. Same model. Add as many as you want; the one with the yellow star is the primary and appears on the contract.
Primary contact. Toggle this on for the one person who should be treated as the main contact for the account. On a residential account, this person's name names the account. There's exactly one primary contact at a time — turning it on for one person turns it off for whoever had it before.
Will sign on contracts. Toggle this on for everyone who needs to sign the contract. Each person with this toggle on gets their own signature line on the generated contract — useful when both partners on a residential job sign, or when a commercial customer requires multiple authorizing signatures.
Tap Done to save the person and return to the customer form. Repeat for each additional person.

The people list is editable for the life of the account — you can add, remove, or re-edit people at any time, and changes flow through to future appointments under this account.

Screenshot coming soonMac — Person form with primary-contact and signs-on-contracts toggles/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-04-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — Person form with primary-contact and signs-on-contracts toggles/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-04-ipad.png

Step 5 — Add the addresses on the account

Under Addresses is the list of physical addresses tied to this account. A residential customer often has just one (their home, where the work is being done); a commercial customer might have several (a billing address, a job site, a head office).

To add an address:

Tap + Add Address.
Fill in the address form — Label ("Home", "Job Site", "Billing"), Street Address (with autocomplete), optional Address Line 2, City, State, ZIP Code, and an Address Type label of your own.
Primary address. Toggle this on for the address that should be treated as the account's main address. There's exactly one primary at a time.
Will be on contracts by default. Toggle this on for any address that should appear on the contract for appointments under this account. Multiple addresses can be on the contract at once — useful when, say, the billing address and the job-site address are different and both belong on the document.

The Will-be-on-contracts default can be overridden on a per-appointment basis from the Information tab inside the appointment, so think of it as the sensible starting point rather than a hard rule.

Screenshot coming soonMac — Address form with primary and on-contracts toggles/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-05-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — Address form with primary and on-contracts toggles/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-05-ipad.png

Step 6 — Save the account

Once people and addresses are in, save the account. Bidvio drops you back into the customer table, with the new account selected at the top.

From here you have two natural next moves:

Start an appointment for this customer. If you opened this form because you're about to estimate a job for them, Bidvio will offer to start an appointment immediately after save. Accept, and you're in the appointment workspace at the Information tab.
Return to the customer table. If you were entering the account ahead of time (a prep step before a scheduled appointment, or capturing a lead from a phone call), the account sits in the table waiting for you. Double-tap or double-click the row, or select it and press ⌘ + Enter, when you're ready to start the appointment.

The account itself doesn't need an appointment to exist — it's a long-lived record. People, addresses, and appointments under it can all be edited later from the account form.

Screenshot coming soonMac — Customer table with the new account/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-06-mac.png Screenshot coming sooniPad — Customer table with the new account/screenshots/support-managing-customers-and-jobs-adding-a-customer-account-06-ipad.png

What's next

Your first appointment — once an account exists, this is the end-to-end walkthrough of running an appointment for it.