Documentation/ Account and plan/ Clients and companies
Clients and companies
The Clients / Companies screen holds the entities that act as the recipient of a document: your own company, the companies alongside it, or, in a practice, each of its clients.
Side menu › Account › Clients / Companies
On this page
What the record is for
Every document has an issuer and a recipient. The system works out the recipient by comparing what is on the document against the entities held on this screen.
Which has a very practical consequence: a company that is not registered here can be read as the issuer, and you end up with documents where the supplier is your own business. Putting your own companies here, with their name and tax number, settles that for good.
This is also the screen that makes multi-company work possible: a practice registers each of its clients and the documents land against the right one.
What is on the card
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Name | The entity's registered name. |
| Tax registration number | Its tax reference. The same one cannot appear on two cards. |
| Trading name | Another name it may appear under on documents. |
| Tax rate | The VAT rate that applies by default. |
The trading name matters when documents do not arrive in the registered name but in the name the business trades under.
Adding, editing and removing
To add a company: Side menu › Account › Clients / Companies and the New button above the list. The card opens, you fill in at least the name and the tax number, and save.
The rest of the actions sit on the same bar:
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| New | Opens an empty card. |
| Delete | Removes the cards selected in the list. |
| Import | Adding in bulk from a spreadsheet, for larger numbers: importing from Excel. |
| Export · Excel | Take the list out to a spreadsheet. |
To edit one, open its card from the list itself.
Adding a second company is the first step towards keeping its books separately, with a chart of accounts of its own. The whole route is in Accounting for several companies.
What can go wrong
| Message | Why |
|---|---|
| A record with that tax number already exists | The tax number belongs to another card. Duplicates are not allowed. |
| The form is incomplete | Required fields are missing. |
Not the client master
This is not the client master. The client master, in the Database block, holds the customers your company invoices, and it fills itself from the sales documents you process. This screen holds the entities that receive the documents: your own company, the companies alongside it, or a practice's clients.