Customers & Vendors

Organize every business relationship in one place -- stored locally in your PostgreSQL database, never uploaded to external servers.

Registering a New Customer

1. Open the Client Directory from the sidebar navigation
2. Press the Add Customer button
3. Complete the customer profile form:
   • Name -- the individual or business name
   • Email -- used for delivering invoices electronically
   • Phone -- a primary contact number
   • Address -- their billing address for invoices
4. Press Save Customer to add the record to your local database

Given Name and Surname Fields

When a client is a person rather than a company, Kantivo lets you store a discrete First Name and Last Name alongside the primary Client Name. Both are optional and sit just below Client Name in the Add/Edit Client panel.

• The Client Name remains the master label. Whatever you type as the Client Name is what continues to appear on invoices, statements, and throughout the client directory. The given-name and surname entries are supplementary, so prior records and business accounts behave identically to before.
• Designed for tidier reporting. Exporting your client directory or an individual customer report to CSV now includes separate first-name and surname columns, and the directory file is ordered alphabetically by surname — convenient for grouping individuals or driving a mail merge.
• Optional for organizations. For a business customer, just leave the two fields empty; everything else stays the same.

For instance, a practitioner records Client Name as "Autumn Wright" and then adds First Name "Autumn" and Last Name "Wright". The invoice continues to show "Autumn Wright", while the exported directory files her under W with clean name columns for analysis.

Registering a New Vendor

1. Open the Vendor Directory from the sidebar navigation
2. Press the Add Vendor button
3. Complete the vendor profile form:
   • Name -- the supplier or service provider name
   • Email -- their preferred email for correspondence
   • Phone -- a direct line for inquiries
   • Address -- where the vendor is located
   • Account Number -- the identifier they have assigned to your account
4. Press Save Vendor to commit the entry

Monitoring Customer Balances

Quickly see how much each customer currently owes:

• The customer roster displays a running Balance beside every name
• Select any customer to drill into their complete transaction timeline
• Review outstanding invoices, recorded payments, and any issued credits
• Produce a formal customer statement for your records or to share with the client

Monitoring Vendor Balances

Stay on top of amounts you owe to suppliers:

• The vendor roster shows an up-to-date Balance for every entry
• Select any vendor to examine their full activity history
• Inspect open bills, payments you have made, and applied credits
• Generate a vendor statement to reconcile against their records

Combining Several Bills Into One Payment

Paid a supplier for a handful of bills with one transfer, check, or card charge? Kantivo captures that as a single combined payment, keeping your ledger aligned with what actually shows on your statement.

1. Select the vendor in the Vendor Directory and choose Record Payment.
2. The payment screen lists each outstanding bill with a selection box and its applied amount. Check off the bills this payment covers.
3. Type in the full payment total and pick the bank or card account the funds left from.
4. Confirm with Record Payment.

Kantivo writes one outgoing payment for the combined total and distributes it across the chosen bills for you. Each bill is then flagged paid or part-paid and tied back to that single payment record.

Multiple Contacts per Customer

A single customer can have as many contacts as you need -- one for billing, another for the owner, another for the technical team. Each contact carries its own email, phone, role, and delivery preferences.

Adding Contacts

1. Open any existing customer from the Client Directory
2. Scroll to the Additional Contacts section in the edit modal
3. Click + Add Contact to insert a new row
4. Fill in the name, email, phone, and role
5. Use the checkboxes to specify whether the contact should receive Invoices, Estimates, and/or Statements — each is controlled independently
6. Click Save on the row to persist it

The Primary Contact

Exactly one contact on each customer is designated as Primary -- that's the person who appears in the To: line of every invoice email. You can promote any contact to Primary at any time; the system automatically demotes the previous Primary and keeps the legacy primary-email field in sync for reports.

How the Email Send Uses Contacts

• The Primary contact is always the To: address.
• Other contacts are Cc'd based on the document type: Invoices checkbox for invoice sends, Estimates checkbox when emailing a quote, Statements checkbox for statement sends.
• Manually entered Cc addresses in the send dialog are combined with the automatic contact-based list and deduplicated before delivery.
• Each document type resolves its own recipient list independently, letting you send quotes to the project team, bills to accounts payable, and statements to the principal with no manual intervention.

Contacts on Vendor Records

The same multi-contact capability applies to vendors. Open any vendor record, find the Additional Contacts section, and build a list of people who should receive bills or account statements from that supplier. A designated primary contact keeps the vendor's legacy email field synchronized for payment workflows and existing reports.

Organizing Contact Details

All contact data is stored in your local PostgreSQL database and remains on your computer at all times:

• Separate Addresses: Maintain distinct billing and shipping addresses for any contact
• Internal Notes: Attach private remarks visible only to your team
• Active / Inactive Status: Deactivate contacts you no longer work with instead of removing them permanently
• Instant Search: Locate any contact in seconds by typing a name, email address, or phone number