Clients Overview

Clients in FlowForth represent the businesses or individuals you provide services to. They are one of the core building blocks of the platform — everything from locations and activities to invoices and notifications ties back to a client.

What Is a Client?

A client is an organizational record that stores contact details, business information, and notification preferences for someone you serve. Each client belongs to your organization and can have one or more locations where work is performed.

How Clients Are Used

Organizing Your Work

Clients sit at the top of the data hierarchy in FlowForth:

• Clients have one or more Locations
• Locations are where Activities (jobs) take place
• Activities are grouped into Routes for daily planning
• Invoices are generated per client from completed activities

Key Client Information

Each client record can store:

• Company name — the primary identifier for the client
• External Client ID — an optional reference number from your own system
• Contact details — name, email, and phone number of the contact person
• Business address — street address, city, postal code, and country
• VAT number — for EU VAT validation via the VIES system
• PEPPOL ID — for electronic invoicing via the PEPPOL network
• Internal notes — free-text notes visible only to your team

Notifications

If your organization has the Notifications integration enabled, you can configure WhatsApp notification preferences per client. This includes opting clients in, choosing reminder types, and setting preferred notification times.

Managing Clients

FlowForth provides several tools for working with clients:

Action	Description
Adding a Client	Create a new client manually
Viewing & Editing Details	View and update client information
Importing Clients	Bulk import clients from a CSV file
Notification Preferences	Configure WhatsApp notifications for a client
Client Tags	Assign tags that propagate to all client activities
Deleting Clients	Remove a client from your organization

Browsing the Client List

The Clients page lists every client in your organization in a grid:

Column	Description
Name	The client's company name. Click it to open the client detail page.
Type	Business or Individual, with the business sub-type where applicable.
Address	The client's business address on a single line.
Contact	The contact person's name, email address, and phone number, stacked on three lines.
Locations	How many locations belong to this client.
Actions	Edit and delete actions for the client.

Some columns are hidden on narrower screens so the grid stays readable — the Contact column appears on large screens.

The Contact Phone Number

The Contact column shows the client's contact phone number underneath their email address, so you can look up a number without opening the client detail page. The number is a click-to-call link: tapping it on a phone or tablet starts the call directly, and clicking it opens your computer's calling app if one is configured. Clicking the number does not open the client — only the client's name does that.

If a client has no phone number stored, the line is simply left out. Add or change the number on the client detail page — see Viewing & Editing Client Details.

Searching for a Client

The search box above the grid matches on much more than the company name. A client is shown when the search term appears in any of the following:

What you can search	Fields matched
Name and contact	Company name, contact name, contact email, contact phone number
Client address	Street address, address line 2, postal code, city, country
VAT number	The client's VAT number
Location addresses	The street address, address line 2, postal code, city and country of any of the client's locations

So if someone calls and you only have their number, typing that number into the search box finds the client. Likewise, typing a street name, a postal code or a VAT number from an invoice finds the client it belongs to. A client with several locations is shown if at least one of its locations matches, and the grid still lists the client with all of its locations.

The search is case-insensitive and matches on any part of a value — searching for 1234 finds a client whose phone is +31 6 1234 5678.

note

Location names are not searched from this page. A client is not shown just because one of its locations is called "Warehouse". To find a location by its name, use the Locations page.

How addresses and VAT numbers are matched

Addresses and VAT numbers are matched with spaces, dots (.), dashes (-) and commas (,) ignored, both in what you type and in what is stored. This means formatting differences don't get in the way:

• 1234AB and 1234 AB both find a client whose postal code is stored as 1234 AB
• BE 0123.456.789, BE0123456789 and 0123456789 all find the same VAT number

The address is read as one line in its natural order — street → address line 2 → postal code → city → country — so a search term can span more than one field as long as it follows that order. For a client at Kerkstraat 12, 1234 AB Amsterdam, NL:

You type	Result
Kerkstraat	Found
kerkstraat 12	Found
1234 AB Amsterdam	Found — spans postal code and city
Amsterdam	Found
Kerkstraat Amsterdam	Not found — the postal code sits between the street and the city

If you want to combine a street and a city, search for one of them on its own instead.

note

Name and contact details are matched exactly as they were stored, including spaces and punctuation. Phone numbers in particular keep their spaces and the leading +. If a search for a full number returns nothing, search for a shorter fragment without spaces (for example 612345 or the last few digits).

tip

The search term you enter is remembered in your browser. Returning to the list restores your last search automatically, so you can pick up where you left off.

Who Can Manage Clients?

Client management requires the Organization Admin role. Regular users can view client information but cannot create, edit, or delete clients. Bulk import is restricted to Master users.

For more about roles, see Understanding User Roles.

See also

• Locations Overview — Understand how locations connect to clients and where activities take place
• Activities Overview — Learn about the jobs and tasks that are scheduled for client locations
• Client Notification Preferences — Configure WhatsApp notification settings for individual clients