Contacts — Customers and Suppliers
Contacts are the people and businesses you sell to and buy from. A customer receives the orders you ship; a supplier is who you buy supplies from. Keeping a contact's details current means orders ship to the right place and documents show the right information.
You'll find them under Contacts.
What a contact holds
- Identity — name, email, and phone.
- A default address on file — street (line 1 and 2), city, state, ZIP, and country, stored both as separate fields and as a combined address.
For a customer, the address matters: it's the default ship-to for any order you create for them. That's why the address is required when you add a customer — including when you add one inline from the New Order dialog. For a supplier, the address is optional.
How the address is used
The contact's saved address is the fallback ship-to for orders you create by hand. Each order also keeps its own ship-to, so:
- Change a contact's address to update their default for future orders.
- Change an order's ship-to to redirect that one shipment without touching the contact.
This keeps a repeat customer's profile clean even when individual orders go to different places. See Creating and Managing Orders for editing an order's ship-to.
Contacts from your channels
When orders sync in from a connected channel, Iraca creates or updates a contact for each buyer automatically. It matches an existing contact by email, or by name if there's no email, so the same buyer isn't duplicated across orders. The per-order ship-to from checkout is saved on the order, leaving the shared contact's address-on-file intact.
Editing a contact
Click Edit on any contact row to change their type, name, email, phone, or address. The address is entered as its parts — street, city, state, ZIP, country — and the combined address shown on documents is rebuilt from them, so correcting a ZIP never leaves the old one displayed somewhere else.
Only owners and admins can add, edit, or delete contacts.
Shipping to more than one address? You don't need a second contact for that. Set the contact's address to the usual one and change the ship-to on the individual order — see Creating and Managing Orders.
Credit terms — who may buy on account at all
By default, no wholesale customer has credit. Every order they place — whether you raise it yourself or they place it through their customer portal — is refused until you (or an approved request) grant them credit terms: Net 15, Net 30, Net 45 or Net 60.
There are two ways a customer gets terms:
- Grant them directly. Edit the contact and choose a term under Credit terms. This also stamps who approved it and when, which you can't see on the form but is there for the record.
- Approve their own request. A customer can ask for credit from their portal account page. Requests wait in Credit requests, a button on the Contacts page (it shows a count when something is waiting). Open it to see what they asked for and any note they left, then Approve — optionally granting different terms than they asked for and setting a credit limit in the same step — or Reject with a reason, which the customer sees.
A customer can only have one request waiting at a time; if they're told no, they can send another once you've decided.
Payment terms — what their invoices say
The Payment terms field on a wholesale customer is the wording that goes on their invoices, such as "Net 30" or "Due on receipt". Iraca also reads it to work out an invoice's due date when you don't set one. A new wholesale customer starts with your business default from Wholesale settings, if you've set one; a retail customer can't have payment terms at all.
It isn't the same thing as credit terms. Credit terms decide whether the customer may buy on account in the first place; payment terms are only what the invoice says about when to pay. Set both.
Credit limits
Once a customer has terms, a credit limit caps how much they may owe you at any one time. Set it on the customer's record — Edit the contact and fill in Credit limit. Leave it blank and there's no cap, only the terms decision above; that's how a newly-approved customer starts out unless you set one at the same time.
Underneath the field, Iraca shows you what that customer owes right now and how much room is left, so you're setting the number against something real rather than guessing.
What happens when they reach it
The check runs when you confirm a sales order you raised by hand, and also the moment a customer tries to place or check out an order through their portal. If it would take the customer past their limit — or they have no terms at all yet — the order isn't created (from the portal) or confirmed (from your side), and you're shown the numbers behind the decision: what they already owe, what this order comes to, their limit, and how far over it goes.
Nothing already placed is lost — it stays a draft. You have a few ways forward:
- Record a payment against what they already owe, which frees the credit back up.
- Raise their credit limit on the contact.
- Grant credit terms, if that's what's actually missing.
There's deliberately no "confirm anyway" button. Raising the limit or granting terms is a decision about the customer that stays on their record, where you can see it later — a one-click override on a single order leaves no trace of who decided what.
What counts toward the balance
The same figure your A/R Aging report shows for that customer:
- Invoices you've issued that aren't fully paid yet.
- Fulfilled orders you haven't invoiced.
Both are money already owed to you. An order the customer has placed but that you haven't shipped yet is not counted — nothing is owed until it goes out the door. If you want a limit to bite earlier than that, set it lower to leave yourself the headroom.
The order itself is weighed at its full total including sales tax, since that's the amount the customer will be billed.
Where it doesn't apply
- Purchase orders — that's your credit with a supplier, not theirs with you.
- Marketplace orders — the platform already took payment at checkout.
- Orders with no customer on them — there's no record to hold a limit.
Retail and wholesale customers
Not every customer is a business. Someone who buys one jar from your online store and a distributor who buys forty cases a month are both "customers", but almost nothing they need is the same — so every customer is marked Retail or Wholesale.
Wholesale customers get the B2B tools:
- Price lists and volume discounts
- Approved credit terms and a credit limit
- Payment terms
- A customer portal login
Retail customers get none of those, and the controls simply don't appear on them. That's the point: a consumer never needs a negotiated price or 30 days to pay, and hiding the options keeps your contact list workable.
Which one a customer starts as
- Customers you add yourself start as Wholesale. That's the assumption worth making — you're usually adding a business.
- Customers from your online store are added as Retail automatically. When an order comes in from WooCommerce, Shopify or Etsy, the buyer becomes a contact, and someone who checked out on a storefront is a consumer.
You can change it any time on the contact, and changing it sticks — a storefront customer you promote to Wholesale stays Wholesale, even when they order from your store again.
Use the All customers filter above the list to show just one kind. On a busy store that's the quickest way to find your trade accounts.
Switching a customer to Retail
If the customer already has wholesale data — a pricing group, a discount, approved credit terms, a credit limit, payment terms, a price list or a portal login — Iraca won't let you switch them to Retail until you've removed it, and tells you which one is in the way.
That's deliberate. A credit limit is a figure you negotiated and a price list is a whole set of them; neither should disappear because someone changed a dropdown. Clearing the credit terms (and limit) in the same save works fine — it's only a leftover that blocks you, not the act of tidying up.
Giving a customer their own sign-in
Wholesale customers can have a login of their own, so they can look up their orders and invoices without asking you, and place a repeat order themselves. Click Portal access on a wholesale customer's row to invite someone.
The button appears on wholesale customers only — a supplier has no orders or invoices of yours to look at, and a retail consumer has no use for an account. See Customer Portal for what they can and can't see, and how a reorder becomes an ordinary draft order on your list.