Customers and partners
The two directories every quote, booking and invoice is addressed to — adding one, switching one off, and giving a contact their own login.
5 min read
On this page
Two directories, one screen
Customers and Partners are the two halves of every shipment you handle, and they are the records everything else in Shipina points at.
- A customer is who a quote is addressed to and who an invoice is billed to. Nothing in the pipeline can start without one.
- A partner is who actually moves the cargo, or who introduced the business — a shipping line, an agent, a trucker, another forwarder. A booking has three separate partner slots, which have their own article.
They are the same screen twice. The columns, the search, the filters and the record page behave identically on both, so everything below is true of either one; the pictures happen to be of Customers.
Adding one
New customer and New partner open a form of four fields.
Only the name is required. The other three are how the paperwork reaches them, and they are worth filling in even when you know the company well:
- Contact email — where a portal invite is sent, and the address every quote and invoice is addressed to. It is checked for shape as you submit, because a typed-wrong address here is a customer who never receives their login and never knows there was one.
- Contact phone and address — the address is the one that ends up on paperwork going to the wrong office when it is missing.
All four accept Persian, and so does every list and record page that shows them afterwards. A name typed in Persian is stored and displayed as typed.
Saving takes you straight to the new record rather than back to the list, because adding a company is almost always the first half of quoting for them or inviting them.
Nothing here is ever deleted
There is no delete. A company you have stopped working with is deactivated, from its own record page, and it stays in the directory — because your quotes, bookings and invoices still point at it, and a name that vanished would take their history with it.
Deactivating asks first, and the question says what it does. The record stays on everything it is already on, and you can reactivate it at any time. It does end portal access: a contact of that company is signed out and refused at the door until you reactivate it.
That is why the list has an Active / Inactive filter. Each chip counts what the current search would leave behind, so picking one never lands you on an empty table the count said had rows in it.
A seat on your plan
Your plan allows a number of active customers and a number of active partners. Inactive ones are not counted, which is the whole practical difference between deactivating and wishing you could delete.
Two moments run that check, and it is worth knowing the second one:
- Creating one. At the ceiling, the form refuses with a message naming your plan, and nothing is saved.
- Reactivating one. Bringing a company back takes a seat exactly as creating it did — so a seat you freed and somebody else took cannot simply be handed back.
Neither is retroactive. A plan that ends up smaller than what you already have never removes anybody; it only refuses the next one. Your billing page shows both counts against their ceilings before you walk into either.
Inviting them into their portal
Invite to portal on a record page emails a contact there a link to set a password and sign in to the customer or partner portal. The link is also shown to you, as a field you can copy, for the case every email system has: it did not arrive.
Two things surprise people here.
The first is who may do it. Inviting anybody — a colleague, a customer contact, a partner contact — is a staff-management permission, not a permission over customers. A role that can create customers all day may have no invite button at all, and that is the setting to go and look at.
The second is that the portals can be closed. A portal is open only when your plan includes it and your company has it switched on, and an invite into a closed one is refused rather than issued. Both switches live on your company settings.
Finding somebody
The search box reads the name, the email, the phone and the address at once, and it is built for the way these records are actually typed. A name entered on one keyboard and searched from another still matches: the Arabic and Persian spellings of the same letter are folded together, as are Persian and Latin digits in a phone number. You do not have to remember which spelling the record was created with.
Sorting is alphabetical by name, not newest-first like the rest of the app — a directory is read to look somebody up, and the order people were added is not how anybody does that.
Notes for your team
At the foot of this screen is a Notes card. What your staff write there stays with your staff: no customer or partner sees it on any screen, and it is never printed on a document. Anyone on your team can read the notes and add their own; editing and deleting are yours alone, for the ones you wrote.