Clients & import

A client record holds everything you need to bill them: a name, multiple contacts, notes, a postal address, a company number, a VAT number, and a default rate and currency.

A client is identified by a single Name - the organisation or person you invoice. (Earlier versions split this into separate "client" and "company" fields; they're now one.) The individual people you deal with live underneath as contacts.

Add a client by hand

Create a client, add one or more contacts, and set a default hourly rate. The default rate flows down to projects and time entries unless something overrides it - see Core concepts -> Smart rate resolution.

Fill in the address, company number, and VAT number while you're there - they're printed in the "Billed to" block of every invoice for that client.

Once you have a few, the search box on the clients list filters by name as you type, and keeps the term in the URL so a filtered view is a link you can share.

Per-member rates

A client's default rate is the fallback, but on the client's detail page you can set a per-member rate for each person on your team - what that member is billed out at (per hour or per day) on this client's work, plus their internal cost to you. When an invoice is generated from tracked time, a per-member rate for the client wins over the member's own default. It's how you charge a senior and a junior different rates on the same account, and it feeds the "team cost" line in Reports.

Editing rates needs the clients.manageRates permission; the internal-cost figures are only shown to people who can also view profit.

Budgets

Give a client a budget and Clerq tracks the value of work against it, so you can see how much of the agreed number you've used before you blow past it. Set it on the client's detail page; leave it blank for clients you bill purely by the hour. See Reports for how burn-down is shown.

Import from CSV

Moving from another tool? The import wizard takes a file or a paste.

1. Upload or paste your CSV (header row first)
2. Auto-map columns - Clerq guesses the mapping from your headers, you confirm or correct it
3. Preview the first parsed rows before committing
4. Import - new clients are created; any whose name already exists are skipped, so re-running the import is safe

# a minimal clients.csv
name,contact_name,email,vat_number,default_rate,currency
Acme Industries,Dana Lee,[email protected],GB123456789,95,GBP
Northwind Ltd,Sam Rivera,[email protected],,80,GBP

A company or organisation column maps to the client name too, so exports from another tool usually line up without renaming anything.

Archive, don't delete

Archiving a client hides them but preserves all history - invoices, time, and the activity thread. Restore them any time; nothing is lost.