Manage your customers

Customers in the menu is the list of everyone who has booked with you, plus anyone you added by hand.

Before the how-to, one thing that explains most surprises on this page: a customer is identified by their email address. There is one customer record per email address per account, shared across all your locations, and every new booking rewrites that record with whatever was typed in the booking form. More on that at the end, under "Why a customer's details changed by themselves" — it is worth reading before you spend time tidying customer data.

The customer list

Each row shows Name, Email, Phone Number and Email consent (Yes or No). If your account has memberships turned on, you also get Member, Applies to and Discount. Those three columns are simply absent on accounts without memberships.

Search with the Search for customers box. It matches name, email, phone number and the consent value — and nothing else. Searching for a street name or a city finds nothing, because the address fields are not searched.
Sorting — click any column heading. The list starts sorted by Name.
Filtering by membership — the Member chips let you show All, Active, Expired, Deactivated or No.
Click a row, or use View and edit details in Actions, to open the customer.

The page loads your whole customer list up front and searches it in your browser, so on a very large account it can feel slow to open but instant to search.

What is stored on a customer

Open a customer and you see one form:

Customer ID and Created — read-only.
First name, Last name, Email, Phone Number — all required.
Address, Zip Code, City, Country — optional.

That is the whole record. There is no notes field, no tags, no lifetime-spend total and no booking count. Email consent is shown in the list and in the export but cannot be edited here — it comes from the marketing checkbox in the booking form and changes only when the customer books again.

Created is not "customer since". It is rewritten every time the customer makes a new booking, so it usually shows their most recent booking rather than their first.

Add a customer by hand

Open Customers.
Press Add new customer.
Fill in at least First name, Last name, Email and Phone Number.
Press Save. You get New customer created!

The email must be unique — the field says so: "Each email can only belong to one customer." If it is already taken you get Another customer on this account already uses this email. and the save is refused.

Edit a customer

Open the customer from the list.
Change the fields you need.
Press Save. You get Customer updated!

Two things happen quietly when you save, and neither asks for confirmation:

Changing the name rewrites the name on all of that customer's past bookings. Old bookings will show the new spelling. This is usually what you want when fixing a typo, and not what you want if you are repurposing a record for a different person.
Changing the email moves their membership records to the new address, so a member keeps their discount at the new address.

Also worth knowing: Phone Number is required by this form even though bookings can create customers without one. If you open an old customer with no phone number, you cannot save any other change until you fill one in.

Open a customer's booking history

Scroll down on the customer to Order History. It lists every booking tied to that customer, across all your locations and all dates, with Created, Order type, Order No, Start, End, Channel, the value, Payment Status, Status, Location and Printed.

Click any row to open that booking.
The toolbar switches Prolong rows and Include membership purchases control whether extensions and membership purchases are listed as their own rows.
Tick rows to enable Export and Print for just those bookings.

If your account has memberships, a Membership details card appears above the history for customers who have one, showing Location, Added via, Discount, Valid until and Status.

Bookings made without an email address are not attached to any customer and will never appear here.

Book for a customer

Open the customer.
Make sure the location you want to book at is selected in the bar at the top of the admin.
Press Book for customer at the top of the customer page.

The booking window opens on top of the admin, and the customer's details — name, email, phone, address and marketing consent — are already filled in for you. Complete the booking as usual.

If it does not open, the message tells you why:

Select a location in the bar before booking for a customer. — pick a location in the top bar first.
The booking plugin is not loaded. On a small screen, open the menu first, then try again. — on a phone or a narrow window, open the menu once, then press the button again.
We could not get your session token. Refresh the page and sign in again. — reload the admin and sign in.

Export customers

Tick the customers you want. Select all ticks everything that matches your current search and filter, which is the easy way to export "everything I can see".
Press Export. The button shows the number selected, for example Export (12).

You get a CSV file called customers.csv containing ID, First name, Last name, Email, Phone number, then Member, Coverage and Discount on membership accounts, then Address, Zip code, City, Country and Consent To Email.

Two notes: the button does nothing until at least one row is ticked, and the column headings in the file are always in English regardless of the language you use the admin in.

Delete a customer

Use the delete icon on the row in the list, then confirm Delete customer? — "Are you sure you want to delete this customer?" — with Delete customer. There is no delete button inside the customer page.

Understand what this does and does not do:

It removes the customer record only. Their bookings are untouched, and each booking keeps its own copy of the name, email and phone that were entered at the time. Deleting a customer is therefore not a way to erase someone from the system.
It cannot be undone, and there is no archive.
If that person books again with the same email, the record simply comes back.

Why a customer's details changed by themselves

This is the behaviour behind the reports of customer records being "overwritten", and it is worth understanding exactly.

When a booking is paid for, Rentalbuddy takes the email address from the booking form, lower-cases it, and looks for a customer with that email on your account. Note what is not part of that lookup: the name, the phone number, and the location. Only the account and the email.

Found a match — the existing customer record is updated with everything from that booking form: first name, last name, phone number, address, zip code, city, country, marketing consent, and the Created date.
No match — a new customer is created.

The consequences, plainly:

Two people sharing one email address become one customer. A couple, a family or a team booking with the same address end up on the same record, and it shows the name and phone of whoever booked most recently. This is not a bug you can configure away — the email is the identity.
Details you type in by hand can be overwritten. If you add an address to a customer and they later book without entering an address, the empty field from the booking wins and your address is gone.
Locations do not separate customers. One record per email for the whole account, shared by every location. The same email at a different Rentalbuddy account is a different customer.
Your history is safe. Each booking keeps its own snapshot of the name, email and phone used at the time, so Order History still shows who actually made each booking, even when the customer header shows someone else's name.
There is no merge tool. If duplicates exist from earlier — for instance the same person with two different email addresses — you cannot join them. Their bookings stay split across the two records.

What to do about it in practice:

Treat the customer record as "the person who last booked with this email", not as a CRM entry you own.
If two people must be kept apart, they need two different email addresses.
If you fix a name or add an address, expect it to be replaced next time that email is used to book.
If you need a clean list for a mailing, take the export soon after you tidy it rather than assuming the tidy-up sticks.