Contacts includes customers, suppliers, employees and anyone else you do business with. Contact records can be generated in Brightpearl in different ways:
- Manual - manually add new and edit existing record.
- Importing contacts - contacts can be imported using CSV files. Useful if you want to add new or update existing contacts using data from another system, such as Sage or Outlook.
- Importing orders - importing orders will also create new customer records if they don't already exist, this will not update existing contacts.
Learn more about importing contacts
Learn more about importing orders
Creating Contacts - Customers & Suppliers
To manually add a contact:
- Go to Customers > New Customer or Suppliers > New Supplier. You should use the customers route for any contact that isn't a supplier.
- Enter the contacts company and name details at the top. Notice on the right-hand side the system looks for any matching records that already exist. If a match is found you can click on it to go to that record instead.
- Work your way through the tabs completing as much information as you need.
- In the Info tab enter there contact details, try to get email addresses if you want to use marketing campaigns. You can change the contact between a customer, supplier or employee here, as well as assigning a Lead source, Contact owner and Status.
- Use the Address tab to record the contacts addresses. Make sure you specify when an address is used (i.e. billing/invoicing or delivery). Setting a Default address is used as the customer's primary address. You can add more addresses if you need to, just save the contact each time and more address fields will appear!
- The Financial tab allows you to store information that will be used when entering accounts transactions for this contact, for credit control and so on.
- The Custom fields tab is used for any extra information you might want to store for this contact.
Note: The invoice address that will be printed on documents for a company of multiple contacts, will be invoice address of the primary contact. Learn about customer relationships
- Save your contact. The Timeline, Tickets and Files tabs will be displayed. You can begin viewing information here as it's collected.
Administrators
"Administrators" are contacts that have been given password access. For staff this is access to the Brightpearl application, for customers and suppliers this is access to their own account through the web portal. Follow the steps as for creating a regular contact but ensure you tick the admin box in the Contact Info tab. To generate a new password for an existing administrator, open the contact and go to the password tab. Tick the reset password box and save to send a new password. Note that each new administrator by default has access to every part of the system.
Note: You should never have two contacts with the same email address, otherwise you will not be able to use either of the accounts to log in.
Learn more about the web portal
Passwords
Passwords can be generated on your contacts to give customers and suppliers access to your web portal to view and acknowledge purchase orders, and stay up to date with the progress of their quotes and purchases. Passwords for staff contacts are used for logging in to the Brightpearl application.
Creating New Passwords
Users can request a new password to be generated using your BrightpearlCart website, or you can send a new, randomly generated password using the admin area. Open the contact, and in the password tab tick the reset password box. Saving the contact will send a new password to the email address in the contacts Info tab.
Updating Passwords
If you know the current password, then you can manually set a new password by using the old password and new password boxes. If you are updating a current password then do not tick the reset password box. You can also change your password in your online BrightpearlCart account area.
Adding & Editing Notes
Brightpearl will add some notes automatically; for example when an invoice is sent by email to a contact, a note will be added to the contact's notes trail. Waiting for payment is an example of a bad note; the information is stored elsewhere in the system, and another note will need to be manually added when payment is made to prevent misunderstandings. “Customer visited office to talk about progress. See minutes file” would be an example of a good note. Notes are automatically tagged with the current date and the administrator name.
Using QuickNotes
Wherever you see a box for entering notes in Brightpearl, you'll see a drop-down menu underneath it which allows you to have some "canned response" notes for quickly dropping in, saving time. Using QuickNotes is a great way to speed up your day-to-day workflows.
Editing Notes
If you have added a note to a contact's record, you will also be able to delete it. Locate the note in the contact's Timeline and click the Delete link. This can't be undone, so once it's gone it's gone!
