Overview
By Birdview definition, customers are the companies, individuals or even other departments in your organization for which you do some work, such as delivering goods, developing a software product, rendering services, etc. As you create a project in Birdview, you may specify the customer associated with it. One of the benefits of it is that it enables you to narrow down the list of projects by using the customers filter. You will also be able to generate an invoice (Billing report) for the customer.
In some cases, you might want to give the customer an option of tracking project progress, or adding new tasks, issues or requests, One way to do it is by using so-called guest users who can interact with the system via the Guest portal, e.g. add issues or requests to a project s/he is a member of, etc.
Warning
Managing customers (creating, deleting, modifying details of) in Birdview is the responsibility of users who have the "Manage customers" global permission in their access level.
Adding customers
To create a new customer, follow this procedure:
- Log in to the system as a user who has permission to manage customers. If you are already logged in, skip this step.
- Click through Company settings > Customers.
- Click + Add customer . The Customer details section will open along the right edge of the screen. Fill in all the fields required.
- Fill out custom fields, if any.
- To create another customer, go to Step 3 above.
- All changes are saved automatically.
Note
The Enabled status is selected by default.
Selecting Disabled will render the customer in question disabled. A disabled customer will not be shown on customer lists. Disabling a customer, like when you have completed all projects for that particular company, has the benefit of still having it on your customer database, so that you can always re-assign them the enabled status if need be.
Billing hourly rate
The billing hourly rate of a customer is used with the "Customer hourly rate" in project billing settings.
To modify customer details, please follow this procedure:
- Log in as Administrator (or a user who has the "Manage customers" permission). If you are already logged in, skip this step.
- Click through Company settings > Customers.
- On the Customers page, click the name of the customer whose details you wish to modify. The Customer details section will open on the right.
- Make changes to the customer details. All changes you make are saved automatically.
Disabling customers
The customers that you have no running projects for at the present time, can be disabled. This has the benefit of making them invisible on most lists while retaining them in the database. As you launch a project for a customer that currently has the disabled status, you just change it back to the enabled.
To disable a customer, please follow this procedure:
- Log in as Administrator (or a user who has the "Manage customers" permission). If you are already logged in, skip this step.
- Click through Company settings > Customers.
- On the Customers page, click the name of customer you wish to disable.
- Select "Disabled" in the status menu atop the section.
A disabled customer is effectively one that cannot be assigned to a project as it is no longer visible on a customer drop-down list. However, if a project or a user was formerly assigned a customer that now has been disabled, it may still be visible in reports or the Customer column, as well as on the list of customers, marked in red in the latter case.
Deleting customers
Warning
A customer cannot be deleted if:
- there is a project associated with it, or
- there is a user associated with it.
To delete a customer, follow these instructions:
- Log in to the system as a user who has the "Manage customers" permission. For details on users’ roles and permissions see Access levels and Permissions.
- Click through Company settings > Customers.
- As the Customer page opens, use the search box to find the customer you want by type a matching combination of letters from its name. You can also search by any other field found in the page, e.g. Enabled (just type 'ena' and all the enabled customers will be listed).
- Click the name of the customer you want deleted.
- Click the additional menu button above the customer details section on the right.
- Select Delete.
- Confirm the deletion.
Export to CSV (Excel)
You can export the customer data displayed on the Customers page (depending on the filters selected).
The procedure is as follows:
- Use one of the filters on the Show menu (All, Enabled, Disabled) on the toolbar.
- Click Export to CSV on the toolbar.
- A CSV (comma separated values) file will be generated and downloaded automatically.
- Locate the downloaded file in the downloads default folder.