Customers & notes
Your customer history, kept in one place, so "the usual?" is a question you ask with confidence, not a guess.
6.1 Adding and finding customers
- Add: New contact in POS creates a Booking contact. Add Customer in Admin → Customers creates a customer. Name is required; phone and email are optional.
- Contact preferences: the optional Preferred language field records English, 中文, or Bahasa for future use. It does not translate prepared messages yet. Owners can turn on Do not contact while editing an existing customer. Kipas then excludes that customer from appointment reminder and suggested outreach targets until an owner turns it off.
- Email: if the customer shares one, save it here; with customer emails switched on in Settings, they get an email reminder the day before their appointment. The consent tick box underneath is only for occasional birthday/offer emails; leave it unticked unless the customer agrees. When a consenting customer's birthday month comes around, the Customers birthday list shows a one-click Send birthday email button. Your team sends it, never a robot. Every email carries an unsubscribe link.
- No-phone customers are first-class: they book and buy normally, show as "No phone", and simply have no WhatsApp button (there's no number to message).
- Search in POS: type a name or phone; the profile panel shows visits, spend, credit, membership, and notes.
- Find a customer or receipt: use the search on Customers or Receipts. Choose a customer to open the full profile, or choose a receipt to open its detail. Owners can switch the Customers page to the separate Booking contacts list.
- Booking contacts: staff can find a labelled booking contact in appointment, roster, walk-in, and POS selectors. Quick-add actions in those daily workflows create a Booking contact. Only owners can open the subdued Booking contacts list in Customers.
- Public booking: when an accepted request has no matching phone identity, Kipas creates a Booking contact and links the appointment. A cancellation or no-show does not convert a Booking contact into a customer.
6.2 Preferences & notes: the little black book
Each customer has a profile for service needs, preferences, and notes (Admin → Customers → open customer → Edit). Beauty workspaces can record treatment details such as nail shape, colours, sensitivities, and usual staff. Wellness workspaces use service concerns, comfort preferences, methods to avoid, the usual practitioner, and care notes. Other workspaces use client or service notes that match their work. Useful notes appear in POS when the customer is selected and in the booking screen, so the team can prepare. Empty sections stay hidden, and notes never appear for Walk-in.
For Wellness, keep only shared client preferences in the customer profile. Put visit-specific cautions, intake review, consent, and practitioner notes in the Wellness visit. For Professional Services, use the customer profile only for shared communication or meeting preferences. Put the scope, approvals, documents, and restricted notes in the case account. This separation keeps the next worker from treating a general profile note as current consent or approved scope.
6.3 The WhatsApp button
Wherever a customer has a phone number, a green WhatsApp button opens your WhatsApp with a prepared message you can edit before sending. On My Day, a reminder stays in place while its action saves and only clears after the record is kept. Mark confirmed also updates the appointment when your role can manage the calendar. Otherwise, Kipas records the note and tells you that the appointment status did not change. On Messages, the status changes as soon as you tap. If saving fails, the previous status returns and an error explains what happened. On the Messages, Reminders, and Walk-ins pages, a blocked new window is not marked opened, and a waiting walk-in is not marked called. Kipas tells you to allow pop-ups and try again. Remember golden rule 1: nothing is ever sent automatically. A no-phone customer is never a problem; they just skip the messaging features.
6.4 The full profile
Open any customer in Admin → Customers for their whole story: package credit balance, membership, recent receipts, upcoming appointments, favourite services, total spend. This is also where the owner can grant package credit manually. Note that a manual grant records no payment; to actually take money for a package, sell it through POS (Chapter 08).
The owner-only Booking contacts view is separate from the customer total, birthday and lapsed lists, ordinary customer export, rewards, promotions, and follow-ups. A booking-contact record shows honest identity and contact details plus recent future, past, cancelled, and no-show appointments. The owner can edit contact details, merge duplicates, anonymize identity, or start checkout. When two records share a name, the duplicate-review panel shows the phone, completed-visit count, and lifecycle label for each record. Customer portal links, service profiles, spend metrics, package grants, memberships, vouchers, and occasion messages stay unavailable until completed checkout makes the person a customer.
Owners can use the customer menu to Send portal link or revoke the current link. If the browser blocks the WhatsApp window, Kipas does not log or claim it as opened; allow pop-ups and try again.
The customer portal puts upcoming appointments first. Packages, membership benefits, and vouchers appear together below the appointment list. A place in a shared group session appears in the same list, marked as a group session; the customer can see it but cannot change or cancel it from the portal, and never sees who else is attending. For their own one-to-one appointments, a customer can confirm that they are coming or book another appointment without entering contact details again. Cancel and reschedule create a request for the business to review. One unresolved request blocks a conflicting second request. After the business acts, the portal shows the result and the applied time for a reschedule. Recent cancelled appointments stay visible.
A customer record can also hold optional e-invoice details (a TIN, and an NRIC or passport number). These are stored for future individual e-invoices and do not print on today's receipts. Anonymizing a customer removes them.
If a customer asks for identity removal, an owner can choose Anonymize customer from the same menu. Kipas removes contact, tax, booking, queue, portal, and service-profile identity data. Receipts and appointments stay as business records under Former customer. This action cannot be undone and requires a reason.
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