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.

Adding a contact without leaving what you’re doing

Every contact picker (the customer on an invoice, appraisal, memo or repair, the vendor on an inventory item) can create the contact on the spot. Type the name and choose + Add customer… (or vendor, partner).

1. Search first. The window that opens searches all your contacts for what you typed. If the person is already there, pick them, so you don’t create a duplicate.
2. Create new. If they aren’t, click Create new customer. A panel slides in with the same form as the Contacts page:
   • General: name, address, phone and email with their types, birthday, anniversary, store, customer type, price level, terms, website, tax number, resale certificate and notes.
   • Additional Info: extra phone numbers, extra email addresses, alternate addresses and relationships. Record who referred the customer here as a relationship of type Referrer.
   • Add to the holiday card list: shown for customers, unticked unless you tick it.
3. Save. The contact and everything on both tabs are saved together, and the new contact is filled in on the invoice (or item) you were working on.

The name and at least one contact type are required. For a customer, the store, customer type and price level are filled in from your shop’s defaults. Everything else is optional, so at a busy counter you can leave it blank and finish the record later.

+ Add customer… (and the phone picker’s Add new customer, Business card and QR code) only appear for staff allowed to create contacts. Without that permission the picker says “Adding a customer needs permission to create contacts.”

“You may already have this contact”

When you save a new contact, JewelTrak first checks whether one already on file looks like the same business or person. It matches when any of these are true, and it tells you which:

• Same company name, ignoring capitals, punctuation and Inc / LLC / Corp / Co.
• Same first and last name.
• Same phone number, including extra phone numbers on the Additional Info tab.
• Same email.

If anything matches, nothing is saved yet. Instead you see the matching contacts, each with its roles and why it matched:

• Use this contact picks the existing record. If it doesn’t have the role you were adding (for example, you were adding a vendor and it’s only a customer), the button says Use this contact, add as vendor and adds that role for you. What you typed on the new form isn’t copied over, so add anything new on that contact’s page.
• It’s a different customer. Create it anyway saves the new contact as a separate record. Use it when the match really is someone else, such as two people with the same name.

This check runs everywhere a contact is created: the New Contact page, the + Add customer / vendor / partner window on an invoice, memo, repair or item, and the customer picker on a phone or iPad.

One contact per business matters most for partnerships. When you invoice a co-owned piece from a memo, JewelTrak bills the partner only for your share if the memo’s customer is that partner’s contact record. A second record for the same business looks like a different company, so the piece would be billed at the full memo price instead.

The New Contact page works the same way: you can add relationships, extra phones, emails and addresses on its Additional Info tab before you save.

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.

Adding the role needs permission to edit contacts. Without it the entry reads ”Not a customer; making them one needs contact edit permission”, and clicking it leaves the field as it was and says so under the box. If the role can’t be added for any other reason, the picker shows why and does not fill in the contact, so the document never saves against someone who doesn’t hold the role.

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

• The legacy app kept customers, vendors and partners in separate lists, and the import brought each one over as its own contact. So the same business can appear two or three times, once per role. Combine them with Tools → Consolidate Contacts rather than adding roles to one record by hand, which leaves the others behind.
• Delete only works on a contact with no history. If the contact has invoices, memos, work orders, payments, purchase orders, vendor invoices or stock, clicking Delete lists what it has and offers only Close. To get rid of a duplicate, merge it into the record you’re keeping with Tools → Consolidate Contacts instead. A contact’s own phone numbers, emails and addresses are deleted along with it and never block a delete.
• 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.