Contacts and portal access

A contact is a person at a customer's company — a name, an email, a phone number, a job title — who may or may not have a login of their own. The Contacts screen lists every contact across every company at once, for finding someone quickly; you add and edit a contact from their own company's Contacts tab, not from this combined list.

When you would use this: the combined list to find somebody or to see who already has a portal login (filter by "Has a login" or "No login"); a company's own tab to add a person, change their details, or manage their access.

Adding a contact: from a customer's Contacts tab, give a first and last name, an email, a job title, and how much of the support desk they may see — nothing, their own tickets, or their whole company's. The very first contact you add to a company becomes primary automatically; after that, use "Make {name} the primary contact" to move it.

The primary contact: the one an invoice goes to when nobody more specific is named. Exactly one per company, and it cannot be deactivated until you promote somebody else — the product will not let a company end up with no primary contact.

Giving portal access: "Give {name} portal access" sends an invitation to the contact's email; they cannot sign in until they accept it. If the email never arrives, "Resend" issues a fresh one. Removing access ends their sessions immediately — this and granting are both their own permission, separate from adding or editing a contact, so a colleague who manages contacts day to day may not hold it.

Resetting a contact's two-step sign-in: if a contact has lost the phone or inbox they use for their own two-step sign-in, use "Reset two-step sign-in" on their record — it clears whichever method they had set up, signs out any device currently using their login, and lets them set it up again from scratch next time they sign in. This is the same permission as granting or removing portal access.

What a contact with access can see: by default, whatever your firm has made visible to every customer, but you can widen or narrow it for one contact specifically — useful where one person at a company should see the money and another should not.

Deactivating a contact: turns off their login without deleting anything they wrote; it stays on the record. The primary contact must be replaced first, as above.

When it refuses: "This is the primary contact. Make somebody else primary first" is exactly that — promote another contact, then deactivate. Not seeing the portal-access buttons at all means you can see and edit contacts but not their access — ask an Owner or Admin.