Clients

What it is

Clients is the list of the people and companies you actually do business with. Leads are individual jobs or enquiries; a client is the customer those jobs belong to. One client can have many leads, many estimates, many invoices and several service addresses.

Every client is one of two kinds, and you pick which when you create them:

• Individual — shown by first and last name.
• Business — shown by company name, with the contact person’s name underneath on estimates, invoices and lists. A company name is required for this kind.

What’s on the Clients list, top to bottom

Columns you can show

Name and the pencil/bin buttons are always there. Everything else is optional, from the Columns menu:

• Company — the company name, for business customers
• Email and Phone
• Location — city and state
• Locations — how many service addresses are on file
• Leads, Estimates, Invoices — how many of each
• Last Activity, Last Estimate, Last Invoice, Last Call, Last Message — the most recent date for each
• Created — the day they were added
• Any custom fields you have set up to show in the table

If your company has renamed “Leads” to something else, that is the word you will see on the Leads column and the Leads tab.

What’s on one customer’s page

On a computer the page has a panel down the left and tabs across the middle.

• Left panel — name, phone numbers with call / text / edit buttons, all email addresses with Add email and Make primary, address, company, lead source, customer type, note, tags, a Locations list, and — once you add any — a Contacts list. Clicking a location filters the tabs to just that address; All locations puts everything back.
• Money cards along the top — these change with the tab you are on. On the Leads tab you get LEAD VALUE, CLIENT COLLECTED, LEAD DUE and LEAD PAST DUE (plus LEAD CREDIT if they have overpaid). On Estimates and Invoices you get the equivalent totals. Clicking a card filters the tab below it.
• Tabs — Leads, Estimates, Invoices, Service Plans, Payments, Tasks, Addresses, Contacts, Documents, Activity and Calls, each with a count. Which ones you see depends on your role.
• Create new button, top right — New Lead, New Estimate, New Garage-Door Estimate and New Task.

On a phone the same page shows a contact card with big Call, Text and Email buttons, a Locations list, and the same tabs. The three-dot menu in the header holds New Lead, New Estimate, New Task, Edit Client and Delete Client.

When to use it

• Someone calls and says “you were here last year”. Search their phone number here before you write anything down.
• You need the whole story on one customer. Every lead, estimate, invoice, payment, task, document, call and text sits on their page.
• A customer has more than one property. Keep each address as its own location, then filter their history by location.
• You want a list. “Commercial customers in Austin who have no invoices” is a few clicks in Filters. Save it, or export it.
• You are building a marketing audience. Tag customers here, then use those tags elsewhere.
• You are moving in from another system. Import your customer list from a spreadsheet.

Do not work brand-new enquiries here. A fresh enquiry belongs on Leads; the client record is the customer behind it.

Before you start

• Your role must allow Clients. If Clients is off for your role the menu item is not there at all. An admin sets this in Settings›Team Roles.
• Adding, editing and exporting need “Edit client details”. Without it the New Client and Export buttons are hidden. Removing a customer needs Delete clients, which is a separate switch.
• Custom fields and Bulk Action are admin-only. Those two buttons only show for admins, and only on a computer.
• Every customer needs a phone number or an email. The form will not save with both empty.
• Business customers need a company name. Individuals do not.
• If your company hides customer contact details from your role, phone numbers and emails appear as dots. You can still call and text from the buttons — the connection is made for you — but you cannot read or edit the number.
• Lead Source comes from your Ad Sources list. If the source you want is missing, an admin adds it in Settings›Ad Sources first.

Step-by-step

Find a customer

1. Go to Work›Clients (on a phone, More›Clients).
2. Type into Search clients…. It looks at company name, first name, last name, email and phone number at the same time.
3. Still too many? Add Tags or open Filters and narrow by city, state, customer type, lead source, created date, or whether they have leads, estimates, invoices, an email or a phone.
4. Click the customer’s name to open their page.

Anything you have switched on appears as a small chip under the search box labelled Filtered by: — click the × on a chip to drop just that one, or Clear all inside Filters to drop them all.

Add a customer

1. Click New Client at the top right of the Clients page. You can also use the small + beside Clients in the left menu, or the + next to your company name at the top of the menu and pick Client. On a phone, tap New in the header.
2. Choose Client type — Individual or Business. The name labels change to Contact First Name and Contact Last Name when you pick Business.
3. Fill in the name, and Company Name if this is a business (it is required there).
4. Enter an Email. Need more than one? Click Add email and use the star button to mark which one is Primary — that is the one used everywhere else.
5. Enter Phone and, if there is one, Second Phone. Each has its own extension box.
6. Start typing the street address and pick a suggestion — city, state, postal code and country fill themselves in.
7. Optionally set Lead Source (from your Ad Sources list) and Customer Type (free text, for example Residential or Commercial), and add a Note.
8. Fill in any custom fields at the bottom of the form.
9. Click Create.

The address you typed is also saved as their first service location, labelled Primary, so you do not have to type it again the first time you raise a lead or estimate for them.

Edit contact details

• From the list: click the pencil on the customer’s row.
• From their page: the three-dot menu at the top of the left panel → Edit Client.
• Quick fixes: in the left panel you can edit a phone number in place with the pencil beside it, click Add phone or Add email, remove an email with the × , or use Make primary to promote a different email.

Add and use service locations

1. Open the customer, then the Addresses tab, and click Add Address. (The + beside Locations in the left panel does the same thing.)
2. Give it a Label such as Home or Warehouse, use Search address to pick the real address, and check Street, Unit, City, State, Zip and Country.
3. Save.
4. Back on their page, click a location in the left panel to show only the leads, estimates and activity for that address. Click All locations to see everything again.

Add contacts (the people at a client)

A business customer is often more than one person — an owner, an office manager, a store manager at each location. Contacts let you keep those people on the customer, assign them to specific locations, and choose which one an estimate, invoice or job is addressed to. This is entirely optional: a customer with no contacts behaves exactly as before, and the picker only appears once you have added someone.

1. Open the customer and go to the Contacts tab (next to Addresses), then click Add Contact.
2. Enter the person’s First and Last name, a Title such as CEO or Store Manager, and their Email and Phone. Tick Primary contact if this is the main person to reach.
3. Under Works at locations, tick the service addresses this person covers, then save.
4. The contact now shows on the Contacts tab, in the left panel, and as a small badge on each location card they are assigned to.

Choosing a contact on a document or job. When you create an estimate, invoice or lead for a customer who has contacts, a Contact box appears with the customer as the default plus each person you added. Pick one and the document is addressed to that person — their name, email and phone fill in as the recipient, while the headline stays the company name. If a contact has no phone or email of their own, the customer’s own number or address is kept instead, so a field is never left blank. The choice carries through when an estimate becomes an invoice.

When you start a job at a location that has a contact assigned, that person is chosen automatically — so the “on my way” text, appointment reminders and the field-worker view reach the right person at that site. You can always change the pick.

Tag customers

1. One customer: open their page and use the tag control under the contact details in the left panel.
2. Many at once (admins): on the Clients page click Bulk Action, tick the rows you want, then use Add tag or Remove tag in the bar that appears at the bottom. You can type a brand-new tag name into that picker and it will be created for you.
3. If you tick every row on the page, a Select all … matching link appears so you can act on every customer that matches your current search and filters, not just the 100 on screen.
4. Click Done when you have finished, or Clear to drop the selection.

Save a view you use often

1. Set up the search, tags, filters and sort order you want.
2. In the Saved views bar click Save view.
3. Give it a plain-English name such as “Austin commercial, no invoices” and click Save view again.
4. To come back to it, pick it from the drop-down. Current filters in that same drop-down means “whatever I have set right now”. Re-using a name overwrites that view, and the bin button beside the drop-down deletes the one you have open.

Export your list to a spreadsheet

1. Set the search, tags and filters so the list shows exactly who you want.
2. Use Columns to switch on every column you want in the file, and switch off the ones you do not.
3. Click Export.

The file covers every customer that matches your filters, not just the page on screen, and contains the columns you had visible. It downloads as clients- followed by today’s date. Large lists take a few moments; a message tells you how many were exported when it finishes.

Start a lead, estimate or task for a customer

1. Open the customer and click Create new at the top right (the three-dot menu on a phone).
2. Pick New Lead, New Estimate, New Garage-Door Estimate or New Task. Which options appear depends on your role and on which features your company uses.
3. For a new lead, a Which location? box appears. Choose Existing location and pick the address, or Add new location and type a new one, then click Use this location.
4. The new lead or estimate opens with the customer’s name, contact details and the chosen address already filled in.

It works the other way round too. When you create a lead and type a phone number that already belongs to a customer, Joby shows Existing client found (or Match found if there is more than one) and offers to attach the lead to them. Choose the customer to keep their history in one place, or No, new client if it really is someone different.

Import a list of customers

1. Go to Settings›Developer Reference›Import Clients.
2. Click Download Template if you want the expected layout, then Choose CSV to pick your file.
3. Click Next: map columns. Joby matches the obvious columns for you; check each one and change anything wrong. Columns you do not need can be set to — Skip this column —, and anything Joby has no home for can be turned into a custom field.
4. Check the count on the import button — it reads Import 412 clients, for example — then click it.

Rows with neither a phone number nor an email are skipped and the screen tells you how many. The importer warns you before you start if no phone or email column is mapped at all.

Delete a customer

1. Click the bin on their row, or open their page and use the three-dot menu → Delete Client. Admins can also tick several in Bulk Action and click Delete.
2. In the box that opens, type the word delete and the number of customers you are removing, then click Review data to delete.
3. Read the list. Joby shows every open lead, estimate, invoice, service plan, work order and task, plus totals for everything else that will go — files, addresses, payment records, equipment records.
4. Only if that all looks right, click Permanently delete.

How to check it worked

Common mistakes

• Searching a phone number with dashes or brackets. Type digits only. This is the single most common reason someone “isn’t in the system” when they are.
• Creating a duplicate customer. There is no merge tool, so a duplicate has to be untangled by hand. Always search the phone number, then the email, before you click New Client.
• Forgetting a filter is still on. If the list looks short, check the Filtered by: chips under the search box and the number on the Filters button before you decide a customer is missing.
• Hiding a column, then exporting. The export copies whatever columns are visible. Switch a column back on in Columns before you export if you need it in the file.
• Assuming the export is only the page you can see. It is not — it is every customer that matches your filters, which can be a very large file. Narrow the filters first if you only wanted a handful.
• Saving a business customer with no company name. You will be told “Company name is required for a business client”. Either fill it in or switch the type to Individual.
• Saving with no phone and no email. You will be told to provide one of them. A customer with no way to contact them cannot be saved.
• Changing the phone number and expecting old calls to follow. The Calls tab lists calls to and from the numbers currently saved on the customer. Replace a number and calls from the old one drop off that tab, so add it as the Second Phone instead of overwriting when both are still in use.
• Typing an address by hand instead of picking a suggestion. Picking a suggestion fills city, state and postal code cleanly, which is what the city and state filters and reports rely on.
• Using Bulk Action without checking the count. The bar shows how many are selected. Read it before you tag or delete, especially after using Select all … matching.
• Expecting to see tabs your role does not have. Leads, Estimates, Invoices, Payments, Documents, Activity, Calls and the money cards are each switched on or off per role. If a tab is missing for you but not for a colleague, ask an admin to check Settings›Team Roles.