Unified Contacts (Customers, Vendors, Partners)

In JewelTrak there’s one Contacts list. Each contact carries up to three role flags: Customer, Vendor, and Partner. A single contact record can have any combination of those — or all three at once.

New in JewelTrak. The legacy app kept Customers, Vendors, and Partners in separate lists, which meant the same person — say, a fellow jeweler you both buy from and sell to — had to be entered twice (or three times). JewelTrak consolidates them so each real-world contact lives in one record, regardless of how many roles they play.

Why this matters

• No duplicates. If your goldsmith down the street is both a vendor (you buy castings from her) and a customer (she buys finished pieces from you), there’s one record holding her phone, address, email, and full history across both relationships.
• One source of truth. Update her phone number once. Notes about her preferences live with her, not split across two records.
• Role-aware reporting. AR aging, AP aging, and partner reconciliation all filter by role automatically — adding the Customer role to someone doesn’t accidentally pull them into Vendor reports.

Setting roles

On any contact’s detail page, three checkboxes (or three role badges, depending on view) control what they are:

• Customer — buys from you. Enables invoicing them, applying payments, AR.
• Vendor — you buy from them. Enables purchase orders, vendor invoices, AP.
• Partner — co-owns merchandise with you on shared inventory. Enables partnership/settlement flows.

A new contact starts with no roles. Tick the boxes that apply. You can add a role later — adding Customer to an existing vendor doesn’t migrate or duplicate anything.

Filtering the contacts list

The Contacts list page has a role filter at the top: All / Customers / Vendors / Partners. Pick one to scope the view; combine with search to find a specific person within a role.

The role filter is just a view filter — the underlying records are the same.

Common patterns

• Customer-only: a retail buyer. Most consumer contacts.
• Vendor-only: a casting house, refiner, or stone dealer.
• Partner-only: a jeweler you co-own memo merchandise with.
• Customer + Vendor: another jeweler in your trade network.
• Customer + Partner (less common): a partner who occasionally buys finished goods from you.
• All three: rare, but supported. Trade colleagues who buy, sell, and co-own.

Picking an existing contact for a new role

Anywhere you pick a contact — vendor on an inventory item, customer on an invoice, partner on a partnership — the picker searches all your contacts, not just the ones who already have that role. If you find a match who isn’t yet that role, the entry shows a dashed + V (or + C, + P) chip on the right and the text ”Click to also add as [role]” underneath.

Click them and JewelTrak does both steps at once:

1. Adds the missing role to that contact (additive only — never strips other roles).
2. Commits the pick on the form you’re filling out.

No need to leave the order / invoice / inventory page to go edit the contact’s roles first. The same one record now plays both parts.

Example (Vendor promote). You’re adding a new diamond purchased from “Smith Brothers.” You type “smith” in the Vendor field. They show up with a dashed + V chip because they were entered as a Customer last year (they bought a ring from you). Click them — they’re now both Customer and Vendor, and the diamond’s vendor is set. One record, two relationships, zero duplicate entries.

Example (Partner promote). You’re setting up a partnership on a piece of consigned merchandise and the partner is “Jane Cooper,” a fellow jeweler you’ve sold to before. Type “cooper” in the Partner field on the inventory item’s Partnership panel. Her existing Customer record appears with a dashed + P chip. Click — she’s now both Customer and Partner, and the partnership is set on the item. Same flow as vendor pick; same one-record outcome.

How the picker ranks results

The picker uses fuzzy ranking (Postgres trigram similarity) — the most-relevant matches surface first regardless of alphabetical position:

• “Smith Brothers” appears above “Smithsonian Foundation” when you type “smith brothers”.
• Company-name matches compete fairly against person-name matches — wholesale vendors with no last name aren’t dumped at the bottom of the list anymore.
• Only active contacts appear. Deactivated entries are filtered out automatically.
• Up to 50 best matches per search. If your target isn’t in the list, type a few more characters — the result set narrows fast and the ranking sharpens.

Each match displays the contact’s current role badges:

• Solid colored chip (C blue, V amber, P green) — role they already have.
• Dashed-outline chip (+ V, + C, + P) — role this picker will add if you click them.

Tips

• If you’re importing data from the legacy app and find the same person in Customers and Vendors, don’t recreate them as one — let the import dedupe and apply both flags. (See the Customer Consolidation utility for cleanup.)
• A contact with no role flags is essentially an address-book entry only. They won’t appear in role-filtered pickers (e.g. on a new invoice’s customer dropdown) until at least the Customer flag is set.
• Cross-role pick is one-way: clicking ”+ V” on a customer adds the Vendor role. It does not remove the Customer role. If you actually want to deactivate a role, edit the contact directly.