Almost everything else in Aiwyn assumes you already know how clients and contacts fit together. This article explains the model.
A client is an organization. A contact is a person.
A client is the entity your firm does business with — the company, partnership, trust or individual taxpayer you bill. It is what engagements attach to, what invoices are raised against, and what carries a balance.
A contact is a person. Contacts have names, email addresses and phone numbers. They are who your firm actually communicates with.
The distinction matters because Aiwyn bills the client and emails the contact. A client with no contact has nowhere to send an invoice, which is why the Email Delivery Hub has a Without recipients flag at all.
The relationship goes both ways
A client can have many contacts: a controller, a managing partner, an office administrator.
A contact can belong to many clients: one person may be the finance contact for four related entities, and is one contact record linked four times, not four duplicate people.
This is why contacts are not fields on the client record. If a contact were a field, changing that person's email address on one entity would leave it wrong on the other three.
Roles live on the link, not on either record
Primary contact and billing contact are properties of the connection between a particular client and a particular contact, not properties of the person. The same person can be the primary or billing contact for one client and an ordinary contact on another. That is why you set both designations from the client record: you are describing that client's relationship to that person, not a fact about the person.
Neither designation affects whether a contact receives invoices, statements, or payment confirmation emails; those are enabled per contact, for as many contacts as you like.
Both the primary and billing contact designations matter only when you create an engagement letter for that client. The primary contact is defaulted in as the engagement's primary contact, the person who receives the engagement letter and must sign it. The billing contact is defaulted in as the engagement's billing contact, the person who must make the prepayment or set up the payment method when the letter requires one. The same person can hold both roles.
All versus My
The clients and contacts lists both offer two scopes:
- All — every record you have permission to see.
- My — records you are directly associated with, through partner, manager, or billing manager assignment.
My is a convenience filter over the same data, not a permission boundary. Switching to All does not grant you access to anything; it stops hiding what you already had.
Related
- Client field reference
- Contact field reference
- Link a contact to a client
- Manage Clients