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Contacts and clients
Keep clients, consultants and suppliers in one address book: individuals or companies, given the contact types that decide where they surface.
What you'll achieve
Build the shared address book of clients, consultants and suppliers that projects, invoices and purchase orders all draw from.
You'll end up with: A clean set of reusable contacts, each marked as a person or a company and given contact types like Client, Consultant or Supplier, ready to attach to projects and invoices.
Before you start
No project stands alone: there's a client paying for it, consultants collaborating on it, suppliers you're buying from. Contacts is the single address book holding all of them, so each one gets recorded once and reused everywhere, as a project's client, an invoice's recipient, a purchase order's supplier.
We'll set up the people and organisations around Northlight Architects' Riverside Apartments (RA) project: the client, a structural engineering consultant, and a reprographics supplier.
Two choices that decide how a contact behaves
There's one address book for everyone the firm deals with, and two independent decisions on each contact do most of the heavy lifting. Get them right, and a contact behaves correctly everywhere it turns up later.
Company or individual. A company is an organisation the firm deals with, like the City of Hawthorn or an engineering practice. An individual is a person, and only individuals carry a job title (the project manager you actually liaise with). This is the structural choice, so pick whichever matches reality.
Contact types decide where something shows up. On top of that, every contact carries one or more contact types, roles that scope where it surfaces. Client, Consultant and Supplier work out of the box. Clients get attached to projects and billed; suppliers get raised against purchase orders. Give a contact the right type, and it appears in the right picker without scrolling past everyone else. A contact can hold more than one type, so a firm consulting on one job and supplying on another can be both Consultant and Supplier at once.
Because a contact is shared, the client added while creating a project is the exact record invoiced later. Add someone once, and Monument keeps the project, the invoices and the history joined under that one contact.
Add a contact
Open Contacts and add a new one. The only required field is the name; everything else sharpens how the contact behaves down the line.
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Open Contacts and click Add Contact.
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Enter the Name, City of Hawthorn.
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Set Contact Type to Company, then add the Client contact type.
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Add the email, phone and website on file, then save.
For a person rather than an organisation, choose Individual instead, and a Job Title field appears to record their role (for example, "Project Manager"). Northlight's structural consultant goes in as an Individual with the Consultant type; the reprographics supplier as a Company with the Supplier type.
Client, Consultant and Supplier cover most firms, but the list is entirely editable. Add your own from the Contacts page, rename them, or reorder the list, so the roles match how the practice actually talks about the people it works with.
Contacts don't have to exist in advance. Creating a project lets you add a brand-new client right from the client field, and Monument saves it into Contacts as a reusable record automatically.
The billing address feeds invoices
For a client, the Billing Address recorded on the contact is exactly what Monument prints on their invoices. Fill it in now, and invoices come out correctly addressed later, with nothing left to retype at billing time.
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Open the client contact and enter the Billing Address.
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Save. Invoices raised to this client now carry that address automatically.
See a contact in context
Open any contact to see outstanding invoices and contact types on Overview, then use the Projects tab to see every non-deleted project they're attached to, whether current or completed. For a client like the City of Hawthorn, that's the whole live picture, what's active and what's owed, without leaving the contact page.
Troubleshooting
- Wrong contact type, wrong picker. A supplier that never shows up when raising a purchase order is almost certainly missing that contact type, since type is exactly what scopes where a contact's offered. Add the missing type and it reappears.
- Company vs individual is hard to change in spirit. A company has no job title; an individual does. Pick the right kind up front so the fields actually match what's being recorded.
- Deleting a contact hides it from current contact and project views. If it has history worth keeping, mark it inactive instead so the record remains available.
Where this fits next
The address book's ready. Next, put it to work: add contacts to your projects to see City of Hawthorn land on Riverside Apartments as its billing contact, and give other people a role on the job. Bringing clients, suppliers or other records over from a spreadsheet instead? Do it in bulk with Import your data.