The people behind the client

People, not accounts

Contacts are the people at your client: the signatory, the marketer, the technical administrator. They are kept separate from your own team, who are users with a role. Every contact carries a first name, surname, email, phone number, job title and notes, plus any custom fields your organisation has defined. The phone number is stored as E.164 with a country picker beside it, and the notes use the same editor as everywhere else: type @ to mention a colleague or contact and # to reference a task.

One person, many clients

A contact isn't locked to a single client. The same person can be the point of contact at one client and the technical contact at another — that type lives on the link, not on the person. So you never enter anyone twice, and a contact's own page shows exactly which clients they belong to. The list is sectioned by client, with a "Zonder klant" section of its own for people not attached anywhere yet, and filters by client, by contact type and by free text.

• Each link carries its own contact type and its own primary marking.
• Delete a client and the person remains; only the link falls away.
• The client page shows the contacts, the contact page shows the clients.

The primary contact

Each client has exactly one primary contact; the rest sit alongside as the others. You recognise the primary by the brand colour of its chip and nothing else — no star, no glyph. Click another chip to promote it to primary; the store allows only one primary per client, and because colour alone can't be read, a screen reader gets its own text label.

Add where you work

You create a contact from the client page itself. Type a name that doesn't exist yet and ＋ Add “Els de Wit” appears — it opens the full create dialog (real fields plus your own custom fields), prefills what you typed, and attaches the new person to this client in one step. It works the other way round too: if the client doesn't exist yet, you create it from the picker on the contact page without leaving the screen. An email address already on someone else is refused with a clear message, because two rows for the same person is exactly what makes an address book useless.

Types you define, fields you add yourself

What a contact actually is — client contact, technical contact, billing — is yours to define under Instellingen → Contactsoorten. A type carries a label per language, its own ordering and an active flag, and is chosen per link, because someone can be the point of contact at one client and the technical administrator at another. Deactivate or delete a type and the link itself simply stays. Missing a detail? Under Instellingen → Aangepaste velden you define your own typed fields on contacts; they appear in the form, on the record and as a list column. Every change lands in the activity trail with who and when, so you can always see how a value came to be.

The address book in, out, and only for those it concerns

The list travels as a file: Export takes the whole filtered set out as CSV, TSV or Excel, and Import puts it back by upserting on the email address rather than duplicating. An empty cell never unlinks a client, and the same five columns (first name, surname, email, phone, job title) ride along in the client export, so a client file brings its people with it. The ✎ in the toolbar attaches a whole selection to one client at once, or deletes it. Who may see the address book is not automatically everyone: a colleague confined to client groups sees only the contacts of their own clients, and a client login sees only the people at their own company. Want that client in? From their contact card you invite them to a portal login, revoke it again, or sign in as them to see what they see — the client portal is an extension module with its own licence key, while the core of schakl. is open source (AGPL).