Contacts screen overview

Here's a brief tour of the Contacts screen in FreeAgent and what you can see there.

This is the Contacts screen.

Clients and suppliers

Here you can see all your business's contacts, both clients and suppliers. A contact becomes a client automatically when you've entered an invoice or estimate for that contact. Similarly, a contact automatically becomes a supplier when you enter a bill from that contact. You don't need to tick any boxes to say whether a contact is a client or a supplier.

Filtering the Contacts screen

You can choose which contacts to view.

Filter by name

For example, you can choose to filter by the contact's name, by clicking the initial letter of the organisation, or if you haven't entered an organisation name, the individual's surname.

Then you can go back to looking at all your contacts by clicking the Show All button.

Filter by type

For example, if you only want to see clients with active projects, choose that option from the drop-down menu here.

This also lets you choose to view hidden or all contacts.

Hidden contacts

If you don't want a contact to appear in the list when you're creating a new invoice, or a new bill, or anywhere else in FreeAgent, you can mark them as hidden on the Summary tab, which you'll see in a moment.

Basically, this lets you tidy up your lists of contacts if you're no longer working with a particular contact, for example a supplier who's gone out of business.

Viewing contacts

You can view your contacts either as a grid, like this, or in a list, by clicking on the List View option here.

This will bring up contacts beginning with that letter only.

If you want to see all your contacts again, click the Show All button.

Money owed and owing

You can see how much money each client owes you and how much you owe to each supplier.

Projects for clients

You can also see whether any active projects are attached to particular clients. Click the drop-down arrow to see more information about the projects.

A closer look at contact details

To look at the details of any contact, just click on their name. This brings up the Contact Details screen for that contact, which is divided into tabs.

On the Summary tab, you can see the contact's name and address information, including what invoice referencing system you're using. You might be using business-wide referencing in which case you'd see "Global sequence" here, or you can use contact-specific referencing. This is handy if you want to use a different prefix for each client's sales invoices.

This is also where you choose the contact's status and hide a contact or make it active.

And you can also see totals for how much you've invoiced the client in the past, and/or how much they've billed you for, and how much you've received from and/or paid to them.

On the Projects tab, you can see details of any active and any finished projects for that contact.

The Statement of Account tab lets you create a contact or supplier statement.

On the Account History tab, you'll see a history of your transactions with that contact.

The Notes tab lets you add notes to your contacts, for example to let your colleagues know if a particular client is a slow payer.

How can I delete a contact?

Contacts can only be deleted if you haven't made any entries, such as invoices or bills, for that contact. Once you've entered an invoice or a bill for a contact then that contact cannot be deleted from FreeAgent. For a contact that doesn't yet have any entries against it, then there would be a Delete button at the top of the Contact Details screen.

From the Contacts grid, you can also delete a contact by clicking the cross next to the Edit button against that contact's name.

Changing a contact's details

If you want to change any details for a contact, from the overview screen click the Edit button for that contact, or, with the contact open, click the Edit Details button at the top of the Contact Details screen.

Quick link to invoice, project, estimate or bill

You do also have the option to create a new invoice, project, estimate or bill for this contact directly, by clicking this Add New button next to the Edit Details button. Choose the option you want from the drop-down menu.