Customer Groups

Sort your customers into groups — weddings, families, business, VIP, a lead source — and use those groups to filter the customer list, to target a newsletter, and to branch a workflow.

A customer can be in no group, one, or several. A group is referenced by its id everywhere, so renaming or recolouring it shows up on every customer at once without touching a customer record.

Permissions

customers.groups.manage is granted to super_admin and admin by default. It is separate from customers.edit on purpose: a role that may edit a customer’s address does not silently gain the right to reorganise the whole customer base. See Multi-Admin for the role editor.

Every group change and every assignment is written to the activity log with the admin who made it.

Managing the catalogue

Open Clients → Accounts → Groups.

• Create a group with a name (up to 80 characters, unique regardless of case — “VIP” and “vip” are the same group), an optional description and a colour.
• Colour — pick one of the eight palette colours or any hex value. The colour is only ever a dot beside the name, never the only thing that tells groups apart, so every colour is allowed. If a colour is hard to make out on the light or dark background, the form says so; it does not refuse it.
• Reorder with the up / down arrows. The order is the one used on chips, filters and pickers everywhere.
• Archive a group to retire it. An archived group stays on the customers who already carry it — it is history — but it is no longer offered for new assignments or as a filter. Restore brings it back.
• Delete only works on a group nobody is in. Deleting a group never deletes or changes a customer. To get rid of a group that is in use, archive it, or take the customers out of it first.

Putting customers in groups

• On the customer’s page — the Groups card lists the customer’s groups; Change groups opens a checklist. An archived group the customer already carries stays ticked; untick it to take them out.
• When creating a customer — the create / invite form shows the live groups as checkboxes when you hold customers.groups.manage. If a picked group turns out to be archived or gone, nothing is created, so you never end up with a customer who silently lost the groups you picked.
• In bulk — see Bulk changes below.

Filtering the customer list

The list opens on every customer. Above it:

• Group pills — click one or more to show only customers in those groups. Each pill shows how many customers are in the group.
• Any of them / All of them — appears once two or more groups are selected. Any shows customers in at least one of the selected groups; All only those in every one of them.
• Ungrouped — customers in no group at all, the ones that still need sorting. It cannot be combined with group pills: picking one switches the other off.
• Status — all, active or deactivated customers.
• Search — email, name or company, on top of whatever is filtered.
• Clear resets everything.

The counts on the pills (and on Ungrouped) are over all customers, whatever their status, and are not narrowed by the search or status filter.

The whole filter is kept in the page address, so a filtered list survives a reload and can be bookmarked or pasted to another admin. A group that has been archived or deleted since the link was made is dropped from the filter. The customer-list API still accepts an archived group as a filter, since an archived group still describes who was in it; that is a view only. Actions — newsletters and workflows — ignore archived groups.

When nothing matches, the list says “No customers match these filters.” with a way back to the full list; “No customers yet” only appears when there are really no customers.

Bulk changes

With customers.groups.manage, each row of the customer list has a checkbox. The checkbox in the header selects every customer the current filter and search show. Changing the filter or the search clears the selection.

1. Select customers, then choose Add to groups… or Remove from groups….
2. Pick the groups. Add offers the live groups; Remove offers the groups the selected customers are actually in, archived ones included.
3. The dialog works out the effect before anything is changed — for example “Adds 12 memberships. 3 customers are already in VIP.” Customers already in a group are not added twice, and removing someone from a group they are not in does nothing.
4. The confirm button states the effect (Add 12 memberships) and stays off while the preview is loading or when the change would do nothing.

At most 500 customers can be selected for one change; above that the buttons are off until you narrow the filter or the selection.

A bulk change is all or nothing. If any selected customer or group no longer exists, or a group to add has been archived in the meantime, nothing is changed and the dialog says why. One bulk change covers up to 500 customers and 100 groups. It is recorded as a single activity-log entry with the admin, the group ids, the customer ids and the counts — no names or email addresses.

Groups elsewhere in the admin

Admins with customers.view see a customer’s group chips (up to two, then “+n”) wherever a customer is picked or shown:

• the customer picker in the quote, invoice, contract, hours and message editors — on the search results and on the selected customer;
• the customer picker on the event form, and the customers assigned to an event;
• the project cockpit, beside the project’s customer.

Event and project pages only need events.view. Without customers.view those pages simply show no groups.

Newsletters by group

A newsletter campaign can target Customers in groups (needs customers.view to pick them). Choose one or more live groups and, for two or more, any or all of them.

• Membership is read when the campaign is queued, not when you save the draft: customers added to the group in between receive it, customers removed in between don’t, and a group deleted or archived in between contributes nobody. With all of them, one such group means nobody matches. If the groups have nobody left in them, the campaign refuses to queue.
• The same rules as All active customers apply on top: deactivated customers and customers who opted out of marketing mail are left out.
• Who a queued campaign reached is recorded per recipient at queue time. Changing the groups afterwards does not change that record.
• A draft that names a group which has since been archived can’t be saved until that group is unticked.

Workflows

Workflows can branch on Customer is in group: pick the groups and whether the customer has to be in any or all of them. The check runs when the step runs, so a step after a wait sees the groups as they are then. As with newsletters, an archived group contributes nobody: with all of them, a condition that names an archived group never matches.

The condition needs a customer on the run. The customer-created, quote, contract and invoice triggers carry one; on gallery and event triggers there is no customer and the condition always takes the no branch.

When a customer is created with groups, the customer and the groups are stored together, before the customer-created workflow event fires, so the condition sees them straight away.

Erasing a customer

Erasing a customer takes them out of every group, so the member counts drop and an otherwise empty group can then be deleted.