Customers, projects, and areas

Every order in Mattersmith is for one space in one job for one customer. Mattersmith keeps track of these as customers, projects, and areas.

How they fit together

• A customer is the person or company you’re building for. They have contact details and an address.
• A project is one job for that customer, such as a kitchen remodel or a new house. It has its own address: where the work will be installed. A customer can have many projects.
• An area is one room or space in a project, such as “Kitchen” or “Primary Bath”. A project can have many areas.
• An order belongs to one area. An area can have many orders, for example a first order and a later add-on.

For example: Jordan Lee (customer) → Lee Kitchen Remodel (project) → Kitchen (area) → Order #429.

Why the project has its own address

The customer’s address is where you send invoices and contact them. The project’s address is where the cabinets are going. They’re often different: a contractor’s office versus the job site, or a homeowner’s current home versus the one they’re building.

An order needs the project address before it can be submitted.

Linked orders

When you create an order from a customer, project, or area, it’s linked to those saved records. A linked order reads its customer, project, and area details from them, so:

• you enter a customer’s details once, not on every order
• updating a customer’s phone number updates it on all their quotes
• the customer, project, and area pages list every order that belongs to them

You can also create an order that isn’t linked, and type its details in directly. That’s handy for a one-off order, but those details only live on that order.

What happens when an order is submitted

When an order is submitted, Mattersmith takes a snapshot of its customer, project, and area details. The Details tab from then on shows that snapshot, even if someone edits the customer later. Links on the tab still go to the current saved records.

That way, an order in production always shows the details it was priced and accepted with.

Sharing with your team

Every Order Manager in your organization can already see every customer, project, and order. Sharing decides who can change them.

A customer or order that isn’t shared can only be edited by the person who created it. Once it’s shared with your team, every Order Manager can edit it too. That matters when several people take calls from the same customers: anyone can pick up where a colleague left off. Share with team is checked by default when an Order Manager creates a customer or order.

Customers and orders are shared separately. Sharing a customer lets colleagues edit the customer and their projects, and create orders for them. It doesn’t let them edit the customer’s existing quotes; each quote has its own setting.

Sharing is one-way on purpose. Once colleagues start working on something shared, the creator can’t take it back; only an admin can make it private again. Orders show a handshake icon next to their status when they’re shared.

See Permissions for exactly what sharing allows.