Contacts
Customers, Suppliers, Users, Practice Locations, and the Practice itself all can all have 'Contacts' defined.
The screen shots below are taken from the Customer Edit screen (and hence the other tabs).
There are three types: Email, Location, and Phone. See also Fax Contacts. The entity can have zero, one or more of each type of contact. Each contact can be set as the default contact for each type, and each can be given 'purposes'.
The available purposes are set via Administration|Lookups|Contact Purpose. Each contact can have zero, one or more purposes. In general these are just for information purposes. However, in two cases they are very important. As discussed in Reporting|Reminders, the system looks for a contact with the purpose 'Reminder' in order to decide how to send out reminders. Similarly, as discussed in Reporting|Debtors, the system looks for an email contact with the purpose 'Billing', and if found emails the customer's statement rather than printing it.
To set the purpose(s) use the arrows to move the selected item from the Available list to the Selected list and vice versa.
The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set as per the following table. However, you can set it to anything useful - for example 'Eastside Vets (Accounts Dept)'. Note that email addresses created in versions prior to 1.8 will have 'Email Address' as the default name - but when the email address is used 'Email Address' will be replaced by the default shown in the table below.
| Entity | Default Email Contact Name |
|---|---|
| Customer | Company Name if set; else firstName lastName if both set (eg Joe Bloggs); else lastName |
| Supplier (Organisation) | Company Name |
| Supplier (Person) | firstName lastName (eg Joe Bloggs) |
| Veterinarian | firstName lastName (eg Joe Bloggs) |
| Veterinary Practice | Practice Name |
| User | user’s Full Name |
| Practice | Practice Name |
| Practice Location | Location Name |
Email Address - the email address - note that this is checked to have a valid format, but not to see if it exists - if it does not exist then you won't know until an email that you send to the address results in a failure message to the sender
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred email address. See also below.
The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Location' but you can modify it to anything more useful
Address - as discussed in Concepts|Addresses this can either be the address lines (not including the suburb etc) or a complete address including the country
Suburb - choose the suburb from the pull-down list - those available are set via Administration|Lookups|Suburb. For international addresses, use 'None'.
Postcode - enter the postcode/zip code
State - choose the state from the pull-down list - those available are set via Administration|Lookups|State. For international addresses, use 'None'.
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred location. See also below.
The fields are as follows:
Name - this is the 'name' of the contact - by default it is set to 'Phone Number' but you can modify it to anything more useful
Area Code - the area code part of the phone number
Telephone Number - the phone number
Preferred - check this box if this is the preferred phone number. See also below.
Allow SMS - check this box if SMS is possible via this number. Note that if you flag multiple numbers as SMS capable, then when you send a SMS, there will be a pull-down list to select the required number.
For Fax contacts:
Note that the system cannot send faxes - this information is just for documentation purposes.
As from release 1.8, fax contacts are held as Phone Contacts with purpose Fax.
Note also that there are service providers who allow you to send them an email which will be sent on to a fax number. Typically you send the email to 98765432[at]efaxes[dot]com and they send a fax to the number 98765432. If you will be using a service like this, you will need to set the 'fax contact' as an Email Contact.
Preferred Contacts
The first contact of given type that is created will be set as Preferred. When you add another contact of the same type, then by default its Preferred box will not be ticked. However, if you do set this as the new Preferred contact of this type, then the previous contact that was the preferred one will become un-preferred - ie there can only ever be one preferred contact of each type.