Introduction
Every booking, contract and invoice hangs off a customer record, so this is usually the first thing you make for someone new at the counter. You start on the list headed Customer, press New Customer, and a form opens headed Customer # and the number the app has just given this person.
That form is long, but only the top of it matters on a first pass. Down the page, top to bottom, sit the personal details (is company, the name boxes, Dial code, Phone, Email, Invoice email, Invoice name, Notes and Blocked), then the address block, then Place of birth, Date of birth and Nationality. Below those is a row of tabs — among them Financial, Identification, Linked subaccounts/drivers, Emails and Peppol Settings — which you can leave alone until you need them. Save sits at the top right.
You will use this when:
- somebody walks in who has never rented from you before
- a company wants to open an account and be invoiced monthly
- a regular customer brings a second driver who must be on the contract
- you are halfway through a booking and the customer turns out not to be in the system
Words used on these screens
| The screen says | It means |
|---|---|
| is company | Whether this is a business rather than a private person |
| Invoice name | The name that gets printed on the invoice |
| Quick lookup name | A single search box that combines the invoice name, date of birth and postcode |
| New sub account | Adds an extra driver allowed to drive on this customer's bookings |
| Know your customer | An identity and background check bought from an outside service |
| Peppol | A European standard for sending invoices to a business electronically |
Every way to create a customer
| Where you start | What you get |
|---|---|
| Customers in the main menu, then the Customers tile, then New Customer | The full form, with Dial code and Nationality already filled in from your company's default country. |
| Add new on the customer picker while you are building a booking | The same full form, attached to that booking straight away. The dial code is not pre-filled on this route. |
| New sub account on the Linked subaccounts/drivers tab of a customer already open | A short four-field form for an extra driver, linked to that customer and set to a private person. |
| New employee on the Linked employees/subdivisions tab | The same short form, for a contact at a business customer. |
Use the first route for anyone who will have their own bookings and invoices; use the last two only for people who ride along on somebody else's account.
How to use
Configuration
Four settings decide how this form behaves for your whole company. From the main menu open Settings, then click Operational. The screen is headed Operational settings and is a single long page of sections. The first three switches are in the General section at the top; the fourth is further down, in the section headed Customer validation.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Default Country (General) | empty | Fills Dial code, Nationality and the country on the address of every new customer. Leave it empty and new customers get the dial code of whichever country happens to be first in the country list. |
| Existing customer validation (General) | on | Refuses to save a customer whose email address is already used by another customer of yours. |
| Show name fields at company (General) | off | Shows First name and Last name on business customers as well. While it is off, those two boxes disappear the moment is company is set to yes. |
| min age (Customer validation) | 18 | The youngest a customer may be. Set it to 0 to turn the age check off. |
Change a setting and press Save on that screen. All four apply from that moment on; customers already in the system are not re-checked and are not changed.
The rest of the Customer validation section — Name, Email, Phone, Birth data, Address, Company name, Chamber of commerce, Tax number, IBAN, BIC, Drivers license and the Show switches below them — does not change what this form will refuse to save. Leave those as your company has them unless your administrator tells you otherwise.
Before you start: creating and editing customers needs a normal staff account; Operational settings is limited to a company administrator, so ask them if one of the four settings above is wrong. Every customer you create belongs to your own company and nobody outside it will ever see it.
Using the customer form
From the main menu open Customers, then click the Customers tile. The list is headed Customer and has a search box over every column, including Quick lookup name. Search first — a customer who came in last year is quicker to find than to re-create.
- Click New Customer, below the list. The form opens with a number already assigned.
- Set is company — no for a private person, yes for a business. The form changes as you do: a private person gets First name and Last name, a business gets Company name and Chamber of Commerce instead.
- Fill in the name boxes. Invoice name fills itself in as you type, and you can type over it if the invoice needs a different name.
- Check Dial code, then type Phone as bare digits — no plus sign, no spaces, no brackets.
- Fill in Email — every confirmation, invoice and payment link goes there.
- Type the Postal code and House number and the app completes Street and City for you.
- Fill in Place of birth, Date of birth and Nationality if you take a copy of an identity document. Leave Date of birth empty and no age check runs at all.
- Press Save, top right. The form closes and you are back on the list.
The boxes that need care:
| Field | Default | What it does | What it will accept |
|---|---|---|---|
| is company | no | Switches the form between a private person and a business | Yes or no |
| First name / Last name | empty | The private person's name; hidden on a business | Any text, up to 200 characters |
| Company name | empty | The business's name; hidden on a private person | Any text, up to 200 characters |
| Invoice name | filled from the name | The name printed on the invoice | Any text, but never empty |
| Dial code | your company's default country | The phone number's country code | Digits, kept apart from Phone |
| Phone | empty | The number staff and the system ring or text | Digits only, at least five of them |
| empty | Where every automatic email goes | An address with one @ and a dot after it | |
| Date of birth | empty | Feeds the age check and the search field | A date old enough to pass min age |
A worked example. min age is at its default of 18 and today is 9 September 2026. A customer born on 10 September 2008 is one day short: Save refuses with Not 18 years old. Born a day earlier, on 8 September 2008, the same customer saves without complaint. Leave Date of birth empty and even a fifteen-year-old saves cleanly.
Key details
Only one box is genuinely compulsory. Save runs four checks. Invoice name may not be empty, or you get Invoice name is empty. Phone must be digits if you filled it in (Phone is invalid) and Email must look like an address if you filled it in (Email is invalid) — but a blank phone and a blank email both pass. The date of birth must clear min age, or you get Not 18 years old.
The form asks for more than the save insists on. First name, Last name, Phone and Email are all marked Required on the form itself, so the screen will not let you press Save with them empty even though the save would have accepted them. The short New sub account form has no required marks at all, which is why people added that way often have less filled in.
Quick lookup name is built for you. Each time you save, the app rebuilds it as the invoice name, the date of birth and the postcode with a vertical bar between each — Jan de Vries | 01/01/1990 | 1012AB. Searching that one column finds people by name, birth date or postcode without switching boxes.
Two buttons inside the tabs save the customer immediately. New sub account and New employee both store the customer you are editing before they open the short form, so on a new record they save whatever you have typed so far and Cancel will not take it back. Everything else waits for Save.
A bad bank account does not undo the save. Fill in Iban on the Financial tab wrongly and you get IBAN is invalid. — but the customer has already been stored by then. Correct the Iban and press Save again.
What to do next: the record is enough to take a booking with. Add the driving licence on the Identification tab before the vehicle goes out. Leave the Financial tab alone unless this customer will be invoiced rather than paying at the desk.
Q&A
Why will a phone number not save? The form only accepts digits — at least five of
them. +31 6 12345678 is refused with Phone is invalid because of the plus sign and
the spaces. Type 612345678 in Phone and put 31 in Dial code next to it.
Why does an underage customer save without a warning? The age check only runs when Date of birth has something in it. An empty date of birth skips it completely, so the customer saves. If age matters at your counter, make filling in Date of birth part of your own routine — the app will not force it.
Why am I told a customer with this email already exists, and refused? Somebody else in your company already has that address, and Existing customer validation is on. You cannot save through it. Close the form, search the list for that address, and use the record that is already there. If the two really are different people, use a different address for the second one.
Why did the same message appear as a warning and let me save anyway? Because the address was already on this record before you opened it. Re-saving an existing customer whose email happens to clash only warns you; typing a clashing address into a record gets you the refusal above. The warning is a nudge to merge the two records, not permission to create a third.
Why is the dial code wrong on every new customer? Your company has no Default Country set, so the app falls back to whichever country is first in its list. Ask your administrator to set Default Country in the General section of Operational settings. Existing customers keep the dial code they were given; only new ones pick up the change.
Where have First name and Last name gone? You set is company to yes, and on a business the form hides them and shows Company name and Chamber of Commerce instead. If you need both — a one-person business trading under an owner's name — ask your administrator to turn on Show name fields at company in Operational settings.
Why can I not find a customer I know exists? They have most likely been archived, which happens automatically to the losing record when two customers are merged. The list has an Archived column with its own filter — set it to show archived records and they reappear.
Can I delete a customer I created by mistake? Not from this form. Leave it and let a company administrator merge it into the right record, or set Blocked on it so nobody books against it in the meantime.
Related pages: Create a booking for the Add new route that makes a customer from inside a booking, and Confirm a booking for the checks that run against the customer once the booking is real.