Clients and contacts
Add clients and their contacts, choose who receives documents, track status and history, and merge duplicates.
Every quote, contract and invoice in Tillage belongs to a client. A client is a company; its contacts are the people you send documents to. Keeping both up to date means documents go to the right inbox and smart variables fill in correctly.
Add a client
- Go to Clients and click Add Client.
- On the Information tab, enter the Company Name. It’s the only required field.
- Add anything else that helps: Company Logo (PNG, JPG or SVG up to 5MB), Website, Industry, Company Size, Business Type and Address.
- On the Contacts tab, click Add Contact and enter at least a First Name. Add an Email if you’ll send them documents.
- Click Create Client.
You can also create a client while building a quote; see Create a quote. To bring in clients from another tool, see Import your data.
Industry, company size and business type are also used by AI quote drafts to tailor suggestions.
Contacts
Each contact has a First Name, Last Name, Title/Role, Email, Office Phone and Mobile Phone.
The primary contact
One contact per client is the primary contact, marked Primary. The primary contact:
- Is ticked by default when you send a quote, contract or invoice
- Receives scheduled and recurring invoices when no other recipients are chosen
- Receives the signed copy of a contract
- Fills in contact variables such as
{clientContact}and{clientEmail}
The first contact you add becomes primary. To change it, open another contact and tick Set as primary contact. If you delete the primary contact, the oldest remaining contact takes over.
There’s no separate billing contact. To send invoices to someone in finance, tick them as a recipient when you send, or make them the primary contact.
Remove a contact
Click the trash icon on the contact and choose Remove contact, then Save Changes. A client must keep at least one contact.
Find and open clients
The Clients page lists clients by status on the Active, Prospects, Closed lost and Archived tabs. Search by company name, contact name or contact email.
Click a client to open their details. The table shows each client’s primary contact, status, industry, last activity and value. Prospects with no activity for 60 days are flagged as stale.
The client panel
| Tab | What’s on it |
|---|---|
| Information | Company details and logo |
| Contacts | Everyone at the client, and who’s primary |
| History | The client’s most recent quotes and invoices, newest first |
| Notes | Private notes for your team. Clients never see them. |
| Payment | Autopay consent and saved payment methods |
Across the top, the panel shows Open Invoices, YTD (paid this year), Lifetime and Avg Pay (average days from issue to payment). Lifetime counts every invoice, including drafts and unpaid ones.
The Client actions menu has Create Quote, Create Invoice, Copy Billing Link and, when the client has a saved payment method, Payment Methods. See Client portal for the billing link.
Click Save Changes to save edits. If you close the panel with unsaved changes, Tillage asks before discarding them.
Client status
| Status | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Active | Current clients. New clients start here. |
| Prospect | Potential clients you’re quoting but haven’t won |
| Closed lost | Prospects that never converted |
| Archived | Past clients you want out of the way |
Change status from the select at the top of the client panel, or with Change Status in the row menu. When a client approves a quote, Tillage sets them to Active automatically.
Archived and closed-lost clients don’t appear when you choose a client for a new quote. Their history stays intact.
There’s no way to delete a client. Archive clients you no longer work with, and use merging to remove duplicates.
Payment settings
On the Payment tab:
- Auto-Payment Consent records whether the client allows automatic charges: Never, Recurring Only (the default) or All Invoices.
- Max Auto-Payment (Optional) caps the amount Tillage will charge automatically. Leave it empty for no limit.
- Saved payment methods lists cards and bank accounts the client has saved through Stripe. Click Send link to email the client a secure link to add or update a payment method. Links expire after 30 days.
Saved payment methods appear after a client’s first online payment. See Autopay and saved cards.
Merge duplicate clients
If the same client was added twice, for example from an import, merge the records.
- On the Clients page, open More and choose Merge Duplicates.
- Tillage lists Potential Duplicates Found: clients whose names match once you ignore case, punctuation and endings like Inc or LLC. Use Search Duplicates to look for a specific name.
- Select the groups to merge and click Configure Merge.
- For each group, choose the primary client to keep. The oldest is selected for you.
- Click Preview Merge to check the totals, then Execute Merge and Yes, Merge Clients.
All contacts, quotes, contracts, invoices, payment plans and Stripe customer links move to the client you keep, and the others are deleted.
Clients with different names aren’t detected as duplicates.