Customers and vehicles
The customer record is the account: contacts, terms, balances, units, and the service history behind every unit.
Everything you sell hangs off a customer and a unit. Keeping these records clean is what makes the fast stuff fast — search that finds people, pricing that applies itself, and a service history you can hand a fleet manager.
Find the customer. Click Customers → All Customers and search by name, phone, or account number. Click through to the customer detail page — the account's home base.
Read the left column. Three cards tell you who you're dealing with: Contact (phones, email, address), Account Terms (payment terms, credit limit, discount, tax status, price level), and Accounts Receivable — the aging buckets (Current, 30, 60, 90+ days) with the Total Balance they owe. A 90+ number here is a conversation, not a surprise, when they book their next job.
Keep the record current. The edit button on the header opens the full editor — names, addresses, terms, notes. Below the main panels, the Contacts section holds additional people on the account (the dispatcher, the AP clerk, the owner's cell) so "call the customer" never means digging through sticky notes.
Work the Vehicles panel. Every unit on the account is listed with year/make/model, unit number, VIN, plate, mileage, and its order count. Click Add Vehicle to add a unit — paste the 17-character VIN and use the decode button to fill year, make, and model automatically. Click any unit to open its own page.
You can also start from the Vehicles list in the sidebar rather than from the customer: it now has its own Add button, which asks which customer the unit belongs to and then opens the same form. Vehicle lists are ordered by unit number, so a fleet reads in the order the yard does.
Scan the Order History. The customer's tickets are listed newest-first with status, date, total, and any balance still due — click an order number to open it, or New Ticket right from this page to start their next job with the customer pre-filled.
Open a vehicle for its full story. The unit's page carries its identity (VIN, plate, unit number), current mileage, its complete service history, and its PM panel — what maintenance is due and when.
Print the service history. On the vehicle page, click Print History. You get a clean, printable history of every job on the unit — the document fleet managers ask for at contract time and buyers ask for at resale.
Use the Ledger when money questions come up. Click Ledger on the customer header for the account's full financial timeline — every invoice and every payment in order, with a running balance. It settles "we already paid that" conversations in seconds.
What happens behind the scenes
The AR aging buckets update automatically every time you invoice or record a payment — nobody maintains them by hand. A unit's mileage history builds itself from the Mileage / Hours In you enter on each ticket, which is also what drives PM due projections. Service history is simply the unit's orders — write clean 3 Cs and the printed history reads like a maintenance log instead of a mystery.
Troubleshooting
Use Customers → Merge Customers. Pick the survivor and the duplicate; all orders, vehicles, payments, and balances move to the surviving record in one operation.
A unit belongs to one customer at a time. Open the vehicle's page and edit its owner — its history travels with it. For a genuinely sold truck, your shop may prefer to add it fresh under the buyer; ask your manager which convention you follow.
The history is built from this unit's orders — a visit written without the vehicle attached (ticket created with "Continue without vehicle") won't appear. Attach the right unit when you write the ticket.
The decoder reads the national VIN database; a mistyped character decodes to the wrong truck. Re-check the 17 characters — and you can always overtype year/make/model manually.