Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 8

Customers & Sites

Customers and sites are the ground truth your whole database stands on. This chapter creates both kinds of customer, tours their screens, and covers the hygiene features that keep the list clean: duplicate detection at intake, combining true duplicates, and deleting records created in error.

Creating a customer

Home/Manage/Customers/Add Customer. The form cares about one field more than the rest: Company Name. Filled in, this is a business. Blank, it’s an individual. That distinction shapes duplicate matching, covered below, and how names render everywhere.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): Company Name of “Harbor Grill Restaurants”, the facilities office address, and the head of facilities as the first contact. The twelve locations don’t go on this form. They become sites next.

Residential (the Okafors): first and last name, home address, cell, email. Saving creates both the customer and their first site at the same address in one step, which is why residential intake is fast enough to do live on the phone.

Duplicate detection on add

When you save a new customer, BigWave compares them against everyone on file using four independent signals: a spelling-tolerant address match, the customer ID, the name (nickname-aware, so Bill Okafor and William Okafor match), and the phone number. Hits appear as possible duplicates for you to review before saving.

Two behaviors worth knowing. A business and an individual sharing an address are not flagged against each other, because the Okafors and the LLC they run from home are legitimately two customers. And the check is advisory. You decide.

The customer screen

Open any customer and the panel list gives you the account at a glance: Details, Create Work Order, then the Items group with Projects, Sites, Work Orders, Payment History (internal users only), and Assets once they have any. The Setup group holds Billing Addresses, Contacts, Documents, Regions, the customer-level Import / Export Center, and the definitions for site custom fields (chapter 10). Custom field groups and the Audit Trail round it out.

Three panels deserve a word now.

Billing Addresses. A customer can have several. Bill the franchise office, not the store. You pick one at invoice time.

Contacts. People at the customer: who to call, who gets emailed documents, who can hold a portal login. Sites have their own contacts too, for the store-manager case.

Regions. Large multi-site customers can group sites into regions, and the label itself is configurable per customer: Districts, Zones. Regions drive My Region Assignments on the home page, so assign your dispatchers to regions and each sees their own territory’s work orders. Skip regions for customers with a handful of sites.

Sites

Add sites from the customer’s Sites panel. Each site is a physical location with its own address, Site ID (your customer’s own store number, like HG-014, which matters enormously for imports), contacts, documents, assets, work order history, custom fields and audit trail.

For twelve sites, add them by hand. For three hundred, import them from a spreadsheet through the Import / Export Center. Chapter 22 does exactly that.

The rule from chapter 1 bears repeating, because getting it wrong is the most common data mistake in field service systems. When the Okafors buy the lake house, add a second site to the existing customer. Payment history stays unified and each property keeps its own service story.

Combining duplicate customers

Detection at intake is advisory, so real duplicates still happen. Two spellings, an import overlap. Combine consolidates them. Launch it from the customer you want to keep, pick the duplicate, and BigWave moves everything onto the keeper: sites, work orders, assets, payments, documents, contacts. The duplicate is then retired.

You stay in control of the details. For each of the duplicate’s sites you decide whether it merges into one of the keeper’s existing sites or comes across as a new site. Contacts move too, except ones that would obviously duplicate a contact already there, and anything skipped is listed on the confirmation screen before you commit. The keeper’s own details are never overwritten.

A combine can be undone. Reverse Combine, launched from the same customer, restores the folded-in record with its work orders, sites and contacts.

Deleting a customer or site

Delete exists for records with no history: a customer with no work orders and no payments, a site with no work orders. Anything with history can’t be deleted, on purpose. Combine it instead so the history survives. The delete check runs before the confirmation dialog, so a blocked record tells you why rather than asking you to confirm something that will fail.

Checklist

  1. Decide who owns customer intake, and train them on the Company Name rule and the duplicate review.
  2. Enter Site IDs using the customer’s own location numbering, not yours.
  3. Set up regions only for customers big enough to have territories.
  4. Add billing addresses before the first invoice, not during it.
  5. Run an occasional duplicate sweep. Review, combine, keep the base clean.