PayPolka

Clients & Contacts

Clients are the heart of PayPolka. Every estimate, invoice, and payment is tied to a client, and each client carries its own contacts and billing defaults so you don’t have to set the same things over and over.

Creating and editing a client

From the Clients section, choose New client (or open an existing client and choose Edit). You can fill in:

  • Name — the business or person you’re working with.
  • Website — optional.
  • Address — street, city, state, and ZIP. State is chosen from a US state dropdown.
  • Internal notes — private notes for your own reference. Clients never see these.
  • Status — Active or Inactive. Inactive clients stay in your records but are kept out of the way for everyday work. Marking a client inactive does not delete anything.

Contacts

A client can have one or more contacts — the actual people you communicate with. Open a client and use the Contacts panel to manage them.

Each contact has:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Role (for example, “Owner” or “Accounts payable”)

Adding and removing contacts

  • Use the contacts panel to add a new contact, or remove one you no longer need.

The primary contact

One contact can be promoted to primary. The primary contact is the person who receives estimate and invoice emails for that client. There can be only one primary contact per client — promoting a different contact moves the primary status to them.

Per-client invoice defaults

Each client has a set of billing defaults. These defaults are snapshotted onto each new estimate or invoice you create for the client — copied in at the moment you create the document. Changing a client’s defaults later does not change documents you’ve already created, and you can always override any value on an individual document before saving.

The defaults are:

  • Payment terms — when payment is due, such as Net 30 (due 30 days after the invoice date).
  • Tax rate (%) — the sales-tax rate applied to taxable line items. This determines the tax invoiced and, once paid, the tax collected on the document.
  • Discount rate (%) — an optional discount applied to the document.
  • Payment reminders — turn automatic reminder emails on or off for this client.
  • Late-fee policy — control whether a late fee applies and how it’s calculated:
    • Enabled — whether late fees apply at all.
    • Type — fixed (a flat dollar amount) or percentage (a percent of the balance).
    • Amount / percentage — the dollar amount or percent, depending on the type.
    • Grace days — how many days past the due date before a late fee kicks in.

Because these are defaults, you can adjust the tax rate, discount, reminders, or late-fee terms on any single estimate or invoice without affecting the client’s saved settings.

The client detail tabs

When you open a client, their page is organized into tabs:

  • Details — the client’s profile, contacts, and invoice defaults.
  • Estimates — every estimate for this client.
  • Invoices — every invoice for this client.

Quick-create from the client page

From a client’s page you can jump straight into new work:

  • New estimate
  • New invoice

Both preselect this client and apply that client’s defaults (payment terms, tax, discount, reminders, and late-fee policy). If you started from the wrong client, you can change the client on the form before saving.

Importing clients from a CSV

If you’re moving over from another tool or a spreadsheet, you can import clients from a CSV file instead of adding them one at a time. Prepare your file with your client details and upload it from the Clients section to create them in bulk.

The client payment portal

Each client has a secure online portal where they can view and pay their invoices. Learn more in Public pages & client portal.