Look up a customer from CRM: the Customers directory, its counters and the account record

The menu is labelled Customers, but the screen behind it carries no filter of any kind. Every contact in the database is in it: companies and individuals, customers and suppliers, the child contacts that sit under a company, and the contact records of your own colleagues. The pager count is the size of the address book, not the size of your customer base.

That is worth knowing rather than fighting. Use Customer Invoices when you need the billed customers, and remember that a genuine new prospect who has never been invoiced will not be in that filtered list either.

The picker at the right end of the header row also offers Tax ID, Salesperson, Street, City, State, Tags and Properties.

Group by offers Salesperson, Company (which puts child contacts under their parent), Country and Properties; the Accounting add-on adds a few of its own. There is no group by tag.

The coloured pills are one field, computed live per contact. A pill is left out entirely when its count is zero, so a card with three pills is not missing anything — it simply has no meetings.

The row of buttons across the top of the record is the fastest route into that account's history. Several of them hide themselves when they have nothing to show.

Below the buttons the record opens with the Person / Company switch, the name, email and phone, the address block, Tax ID, Website Link, Language and Tags, then the tabs.

The system will not stop you creating a second card for a firm whose name is spelt differently, but it does warn on the two identifiers that matter. Fill in Tax ID and Company ID and, if another contact already carries the same value, a yellow Potential duplicates banner appears at the top of the record while you edit, naming the other contact and saying which identifier matched. It is a warning only — nothing is blocked.

Two working rules follow from that. Put the Tax ID on the company card as soon as you have it, because that is the only field the duplicate check can use for a firm. And create site engineers, procurement officers and project managers as child contacts under the one company card rather than as separate companies — the counters then aggregate, the opportunity history stays in one place, and quotations addressed to any of them still belong to the same account.