# Contact Persons and Addresses

A customer has one billing address and any number of shipping addresses, plus as many contact people as you need.

Contact people carry their own email, so an invoice can go to accounts payable while the delivery note goes to a site manager.

![The Primary Contact panel on a customer. It shows the contact name Beatrice Hollingworth with Invite to Portal and Send Email links beneath it, then rows for email address, mobile, phone, job title reading Purchasing Manager, and company.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/customers/customer-contacts.png)

*The primary contact is who gets emailed when no one else is named. Portal access is invited from here.*

## Billing against shipping

The two addresses answer different questions and are chosen at different moments, which is why they are separate fields rather than one address with a tick box.

**Billing address** (One per customer)

- Yes: Prints on every invoice and credit note
- Yes: Used to determine the tax treatment
- Yes: Set once on the customer record
- No: Cannot vary per document

**Shipping address** (Any number per customer)

- Yes: Chosen per sales order, so one customer can receive at many sites
- Yes: Prints on packages, shipments and delivery notes
- Yes: Can be added mid-order without leaving the form
- No: Never used for tax

## Add an address

- **Open the customer and go to the addresses tab**

  Or use **Add address** directly from a sales order line.
- **Fill the panel**

  The panel slides in from the right and saves on its own, so nothing you have typed into the customer form is lost.
- **Give it a label**

  A label such as "Bristol depot" is what appears in the picker on a sales order. Without one, people pick by postcode, badly.
- **Mark a default if there is one**

  The default shipping address is pre-selected on new orders, and can still be changed per order.

> **Note:**
>
> **Address panels do not warn on close**
>
> Slide-in panels close immediately on Cancel. The Save button stays disabled until you have entered something, which is the only guard, so finish the panel before you wander off.

## Contact people

A contact person is a human with an email address. Documents are emailed to contact people, never to the customer record, which is why a customer with no contacts cannot be sent anything.

- Mark one contact as **primary**. That is who is emailed when no one else is specified.
- Any contact can be given **portal access**, which lets them sign in, view their documents and accept quotes.
- A contact can be marked to receive only certain document types, so the warehouse contact is not sent your invoices.
- Removing a contact does not remove their history. Documents already sent to them keep the record of who they went to.