Handbook / Winning the work
Clients and properties
People and places are kept apart, because the same house comes back with a different owner and the same owner comes back with a different house.
A client is who is paying. A property is where the work is. They are separate records that meet on a project, which is what makes repeat work legible three years later.
Why the address is its own record
Addresses are normalised on the way in: street suffixes are folded down, punctuation and case are ignored, so 17 Bridge Lane and 17 Bridge Ln. land on the same property. When the same house calls back - a bathroom this time, three summers after the kitchen - the property page already has the first job on it: the work orders, the change orders, every photograph, and what it all cost.
That is the file you want open when somebody says "you did our kitchen and there was something about the wiring".
17 Bridge Lane carries two jobs in the demo data: the kitchen renovation, and a later bathroom refresh at the same address. Both are on one property page.
Open propertiesContacts
A client can carry more than one person - the owner, the spouse who actually answers the phone, the property manager. Each has their own email and phone, and documents can be addressed to whichever one is right for that document.
Undoing things
| What happened | The way back |
|---|---|
| Duplicate client records | Edit one to hold everything and delete the other. Documents are attached by id, so move them across first. |
| Two properties that are the same address | The check refuses a second property with a matching normalised address, so this mostly cannot happen. If it did, edit one and re-point the projects. |
| Deleting a client with work on file | Their projects, estimates and invoices reference them. Deal with those first, or leave the client and mark them inactive. |
Access: Anyone who can manage clients.