Introduction to Contacts

What Are Contacts?

Contacts are the people and businesses you work with — the suppliers you buy raw materials from, and the customers you sell finished products to. In CrafterBy, every supplier and every customer is stored as a contact, and those contacts are linked to your purchase orders and sales orders.

Why Contacts Matter

Without a contacts database, your orders are just numbers. When you link contacts to orders, you gain the ability to:

• See every purchase you have made from a specific supplier, including prices and dates
• Track which customers have outstanding invoices
• View the full sales history for any customer at a glance
• Quickly find a supplier's phone number or email when you need to follow up on a delivery

Suppliers, Customers, or Both

A contact can be classified as a Supplier, a Customer, or Both. This flexibility reflects the real world: sometimes the same person or business sits on both sides of your transactions.

Consider these examples:

• Your beeswax supplier is a contact with type Supplier.
• The boutique you wholesale soy candles to is a contact with type Customer.
• A fellow jeweller who occasionally buys offcuts of silver wire from you and also supplies you with engraving tools would be set to Both.

What Information Is Stored

Each contact record holds:

• Name (business name or individual name)
• Contact type (Supplier / Customer / Both)
• Email address and phone number
• Postal address
• Website and payment terms (e.g., Net 30)
• Preferred currency, if different from your organisation default
• Free-text notes for anything else you want to remember

Contacts as the Hub of Your Order History

Every purchase order and every sales order can be linked to a contact. Over time, your contact records become a living history of your supplier relationships and customer activity — which products sell best to which buyers, which suppliers consistently deliver on time, and where you spend the most on raw materials.

Start by creating contacts for every supplier and customer you work with regularly. You can always add more detail — payment terms, addresses, preferred currency — later.