Editing a Customer
How to edit a customer, including status changes, payment integration details, and what you can no longer change on transferred customers.
Editing a customer uses the same core layout as creating one, but there are a few extra things to watch because this record may already be tied into jobs, transactions, invoices, or a payment setup.
Status
- Active: Normal live customer status.
- Cancelled: Use this when the customer should stay on record but no longer sit in the active customer list. Setting the status to Cancelled here also cancels the customer's live jobs (active, suspended, and quote); completed and transferred jobs are kept. You are asked Cancel this customer? first, and Keep active leaves the status as it was. This is the same outcome as the dedicated Cancel Customer action on the list.
- Why and when: Once you confirm, three more questions show under Status, as in the Cancel customer popup on the list: Why are they leaving? (optional), Anything more (optional) for a note of up to 1,000 characters, and The day they left, which is today unless you change it and can't be in the future. They go away again if you set Status back to Active before saving.
- When you save: The customer is cancelled, and their live jobs are cancelled from the day they left. When you chose why, each of those jobs' Status Reason says so, such as Customer cancelled: Too expensive. Why and when are kept for the Customers Report, which counts them as lost on that day, and show under Dates on the customer's page.
- Status stays in step with jobs: Making any job active again automatically returns a cancelled customer to Active, so a live job is never hidden from the debt list or other active-customer views. Whether that happens or you set them back to Active here, the Customers Report counts them as won back that day.
Core Fields
Reference, source, address, phone numbers, primary email, additional emails, and website all work the same way as they do during customer creation. The big difference is that changes here affect an already-live customer record that may already be used across the rest of the app.
Payment Integration
- Provider: Shows which payment provider is linked to this customer.
- Mandate Status: Useful when checking whether the customer already has an active Direct Debit mandate or is still mid-setup. Not found in GoCardless means your connected GoCardless account doesn't have it, so nothing can be collected with it.
- External Customer ID and External Mandate ID: These are read-only reference values for the connected payment system.
- Last Synced and Active: Helps you see whether the linked payment record is current and live.
Transferred Customers
- Transferred customers cannot be edited: If the customer has been transferred to another business, Work Planner blocks edits and shows the transfer warning instead.
- Why the block exists: It stops two businesses fighting over the same record after ownership has moved.
When Someone Else Makes a Change
If someone else changes this customer while you have the form open, a message appears above the form saying who changed it (or that you did, on another device). What you've typed is kept. Reload loads the latest version, asking first if you've changed anything; saving keeps your version instead.
Related articles
- Creating a Customer: Useful if you want the field-by-field explanation from the start of the customer lifecycle.
- Transferred-Customer Behavior: Important if a customer can no longer be edited.
- Customer Detail View: Shows how the saved customer record is used once you leave the edit screen.
- Billing Request and Direct Debit Setup Flow: Useful when the payment integration section suggests the customer still needs GoCardless setup work.
- Customers Report: The customers you gained, won back and lost each month, and why they left.