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Manage a Company

A company's page is where you work on it after it is created: the customers who may order for it and which of them is the main contact, the ordering status that follows from those customers, the actions menu behind the three dots, the company-wide markets, catalogs, payment terms and checkout, the staff assigned to it, its notes and locations, and placing an order on its behalf. This article maps the page and gives the steps for the parts that have them.

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On this page

A company's page is where you manage everything about it after it is created. You reach it by opening a company from Customers > Companies. From here you decide who may order for the company, set the company-wide rules its locations can inherit, keep notes, work with its locations, and place an order on the company's behalf. Add a Company covers making one in the first place.

Before you begin

  • Your role includes Create and edit in the Companies permission group, which is the permission the actions on this page need.
  • The company already exists. Creating one is a different job, covered in the article linked above.

The company page at a glance

Area What it is for
Company card The name, the ordering status, the Company ID, the customers, the assigned staff, and the actions menu behind the three dots
Customizations The company-wide Markets, Catalogs, Payment terms, and Checkout rule
Notes Free notes about the company
Locations The company's locations, each with its own addresses, payment terms and checkout rules
Orders The company's orders, and Create order to place one on its behalf

A company's page for Northwind Supply Co. On the left the orders area with Create order and the Locations panel, holding one location in Philadelphia with Net 15 and Automatically submit orders beneath it. On the right the company card showing the Approved badge, Company ID NW-5520 and a customer, Sophie Laurent, then Customizations with Markets USA, Catalogs B2B, Payment terms Net 15 and the Checkout rules, then Notes. (opens full size)

Customers, the main contact, and the ordering status

These three are one subject, because the status follows from the customers.

The Customers section lists the buyers who may order for the company. Each is shown as a chip holding their name, and the chip itself tells you which of them holds the main contact role.

A main contact: the chip (1) carries a contact card in front of the name.

The company card for Northwind Supply Co, showing the Approved badge, Company ID NW-5520, the Customers section and Assigned staff reading No staff assigned. (1) The customer chip, boxed in red, reads Sophie Laurent with a small contact card drawn in front of the name. (opens full size)

An ordinary buyer: the chip (1) carries the name alone.

The company card for Nova Atelier & Co., showing the Approved badge, Company ID NA-5021, the Customers section and an assigned staff name, which is blurred here. (1) The customer chip, boxed in red, reads Adam satur with no mark in front of the name. (opens full size)

Both customers can order. The mark separates the person you deal with from everyone else who buys, and it is what the Companies list goes by: Northwind shows Sophie Laurent under Main contact, Nova shows No main contact.

The difference is made when the customer is added. A customer picked in the Main contact field while you are filling in the New company form arrives as the main contact. A customer added afterwards, from this page, arrives as an ordinary buyer, and promoting them is a separate step.

The ordering status on the card follows from all of this. Until one of its customers has ordering access, a company reads Not approved and cannot buy. Grant that access and the badge turns Approved. There is no switch to flip, which is why a company with every other detail filled in can still read Not approved. Granting access is not a purchase.

Add a customer to the company

  1. Select the three dots on the company card and choose Add customer. The dialog is headed Add customer to location, since access is granted per location rather than to the company as a whole.
  2. Find the customer by typing in the search box, or open the full list with the control beside it. Customers already attached to another company are marked Added to another company, so you can see at a glance who is free to assign.
  3. Select the customer. The dialog moves straight on to its second step, which names the customer and the location the access applies to.
  4. Leave the permission as Ordering only, which is what lets them place orders for that location.
  5. Tick Notify customer that they can start placing B2B orders if you want them emailed about it, and use Preview email to read what they would receive. Leave it clear to add the access quietly.
  6. Select Save. The change takes effect at once: the customer appears in the Customers section, and a company that was Not approved turns Approved.

Note: The person must already be a customer of your store. This dialog picks from the customers you have and cannot create one.

Change the main contact

The Change main contact dialog, reading Select which customer is the main contact for this company, with a Search customers box, a No main contact option carrying the current tick, and the company's customer Adam satur listed with his email, above Cancel and Save. (opens full size)

  1. Select the three dots and choose Change main contact.
  2. Pick the customer who should hold it. Only the company's own customers are listed, so add the person first if they are not there.
  3. Select Save in the dialog. The chip changes on the card, but nothing is saved yet.
  4. Select Save in the unsaved changes bar that appears across the page. Leaving without it, or choosing Discard, puts the old main contact back.

To clear the main contact without removing anyone's access, pick No main contact instead and save the same way. The customer keeps their ordering access either way, since the two are set separately.

The company actions menu

The company card for Nova Atelier & Co., with (1) the three dots at its top right boxed in red and the menu open beneath them: Edit company details, Manage permissions, Add customer, Change main contact, Send B2B access email in grey, Remove customer and Edit assigned staff. The assigned staff name on the card is blurred here. (opens full size)

The three dots (1) at the top right of the company card hold everything that changes the company itself.

Item What it opens
Edit company details The company name and the Company ID, the reference you use for the business in your own records
Manage permissions The company's locations, each with an Ordering only permission, for the customer named in the dialog
Add customer The two-step dialog above, for giving a customer ordering access
Change main contact The chooser above, for deciding which customer holds the role
Send B2B access email Nothing. It is greyed out on companies with a customer, with a main contact and with orders alike, so the notify option inside Add customer is what tells a buyer
Remove customer The list of the company's customers, with a warning that the one you remove loses access to place or view the company's orders, and may keep receiving order notices until the customer on their orders is changed
Edit assigned staff The staff list, covered below

Not all of these finish in their dialog, which is worth knowing before you walk away from the page. Add customer and Remove customer take effect as you press the button. Change main contact and Edit assigned staff do not: they raise an unsaved changes bar across the page, and the change is kept only when you select Save there. A change left sitting in that bar is lost when you leave.

Assign staff to the company

Assigned staff on the card reads No staff assigned until you set it. Assign staff and Edit assigned staff open the same list, and whoever you pick is assigned to all of the company's locations at once. To hold a staff member to particular locations instead, change their Companies permissions in Users.

Pick the staff member, select Save in the dialog, then Save again in the unsaved changes bar. Stop after the first one and the name shows on the card, but it is gone once the page reloads.

Assigned staff is who on your team looks after this company, and it does not change what the company's buyers can do. The Companies permission group holds its own entry for this job, Assign staff to company locations.

Set the company-wide customizations

The Customizations card holding Markets with the chip USA, Catalogs with the chip B2B, Payment terms reading Net 15 and Checkout reading Ship to location address and Automatically submit orders, each of the last two with a pencil control. The Notes card sits beneath, reading No notes. (opens full size)

The Customizations section holds the settings that apply to the company as a whole: its Markets, Catalogs, Payment terms, and Checkout rule.

The four are not all changed in the same place. Payment terms and Checkout each carry an edit control on this card. Markets and Catalogs are chips that open the market or the catalog itself, with a link back to the company, so those two are changed where they are built rather than here.

These are the company-level defaults. An individual location can carry them or set its own, so put what should be true across the company here and leave the exceptions to the location.

Keep notes and work with locations

The Notes card, beneath Customizations in the image above, holds anything you want recorded against the company, such as a term you agreed or a contact detail.

The Locations panel with Add location at its top right, an All filter, a Search locations box and a Sort control, over a table with the columns Location, Markets, Catalogs, Sales and Orders. Its one row holds the Philadelphia address with Net 15 and Automatically submit orders beneath it, 1 market, 1 catalog, $0.00 USD and 0 orders. (opens full size)

The Locations panel lists every location the company orders for, with the payment terms and checkout rule of each beneath its address, and the market and catalog counts beside it. Adding or editing them is covered in Company Locations.

Place an order for the company

The orders area at the top of a company page, reading No orders yet and This company doesn't have orders, with a Create order button at its bottom right. (opens full size)

The orders area reads No orders yet until the company has bought something. Create order is how you place one yourself, for a business that orders by phone or email rather than through your storefront.

  1. Select Create order. The dialog asks you to select a customer for this order and lists the company's own customers, so a company with none cannot get past this step.
  2. Pick the buyer and select Continue.
  3. The draft order form opens, which is the form for an order you build in the admin rather than one a customer places at checkout. It arrives with the company's details already in it: the customer, the company and the location, the shipping address taken from that location, the billing address set to match, and the market the company sells in. Building the order from here is the ordinary job covered in Create Draft Order.
  4. Finish the order the way the business is paying: save it as a draft to return to, send an invoice, or mark it paid.

A finished order takes the place of the No orders yet panel in the orders area, and the Companies list shows the company's totals on its row, under Total orders and Total sales.

If something goes wrong

  • The company cannot order. It is Not approved, which means no customer has ordering access yet. Add one with the steps above.
  • Create order will not get past the first dialog. The company has no customers to pick from. Add a customer first.
  • The Main contact column reads No main contact. A customer is attached but nobody holds the role. Set it with Change main contact.
  • Your change is gone when you come back. The main contact and the assigned staff are not saved by their own dialogs. The unsaved changes bar is what saves them.
  • Send B2B access email is grey. It is greyed out whether or not the company has a customer, a main contact or orders. Use the notify option inside Add customer to tell the buyer instead.
  • You cannot open the actions menu. Your role may not include Create and edit in the Companies permission group. An owner or admin can add it.

Next steps

Still stuck?

More in Customers

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  • Adding a Customer

    Creating a customer record by hand, from the Add Customer button to the saved record. Three fields are required and everything else can wait, the three marketing consents start unticked and are a record of what the customer agreed to rather than a way to opt them in, and the Save bar is on the form from the moment it opens.

  • Search the Customer List

    Finding one customer and finding a group are different jobs with different tools. The search box matches name, email and phone and nothing else, it searches inside the tab you are standing on rather than the whole store, and the thing people most often type into it, a tag, comes back as No customers found rather than as an error.

  • Customer Tags

    A tag gives a group of customers a name so it is already assembled when you need it. This article covers where tags are set, one record at a time or in bulk from the list, what a tag is actually good for once it exists, and the one thing it will not do, which is answer the search box.

All 49 articles in Customers

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