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.
Duplicating a contact
Click the Duplicate icon on any contact row to create a copy with the same name, email, phone, and address. Useful when a customer ships to multiple locations — duplicate the contact and update the address on the copy.