How to Manage Clients in the CRM
March 22, 2026 · tropicalhilladmin
Once a lead turns into real business, it lives in the Client section. This is your customer database — every company or homeowner you do work for, with their own contacts, tasks, and communication history attached.
The Client grid
Available columns include Name, First/Last Name, Email, Industry, Phone, Address, City, State, Postal Code, Country, Website, Task Due, number of tasks, Created, and Updated.
Every column is sortable, filterable, and resizable, and your column layout — order, visibility, and sort — is saved to your user profile, so it's there the next time you log in.
The search box filters across name, industry, city, and country at once.
A Without Task checkbox filters down to clients that don't have any task attached yet — useful for spotting accounts nobody has followed up with.
Website links in the grid are clickable, so you can jump straight to a client's site.
Adding a client
Click + Add Client to open the client form.
The only required field is Name — everything else (first/last name, email, phone, address, city, state, postal code, country, website, industry) is optional, so you can create a bare-bones record fast and fill in the rest later.
There's a single address block rather than separate billing and service addresses, so keep that in mind if a client has both.
Opening a client
Editing a client opens a tabbed detail panel:
Notes Summary — a rolled-up view of the client's tasks, communications, and notes in one place. Double-click a task here to jump straight to the Tasks tab.
Contacts — full add/edit/delete management of every person tied to this client, separate from the client's own primary contact info.
Tasks — create and manage tasks linked directly to this client.
Communication — a history of emails sent to and from this client.
Notes — free-form notes on the account.
From the header you can also Send Email or Send Email Template straight to the client.
Note: the client record itself doesn't have a jobs, invoices, or estimates tab — those live on their own pages elsewhere in the CRM and are linked to the client behind the scenes rather than surfaced here.
Working with many clients at once
Select multiple rows with the checkboxes to unlock:
Export Selected — download the selected clients as a CSV.
Create Tasks — build one task and apply it across every selected client at once.
Send Campaign — send the selected clients to the email campaigns tool.
Delete — remove the selected clients in bulk.
Importing clients
Use Import to upload a CSV of existing customers.
Columns are auto-matched to fields by header name, and you can drag and drop columns onto the correct field if the match is wrong — you can even combine two source columns into a single field.
You can map up to three separate contacts per row (first/last name, email, phone, title, address), and each is created as a linked contact automatically after import — a contact needs at least a first and last name to be created.
The preview screen shows Total, Ready, and Warning counts before you confirm. Rows missing both a phone number and a website are flagged as warnings so you can review them, though this is a completeness check rather than true duplicate detection against your existing client list.
You can search and deselect individual rows before confirming the import.
Each row imports independently, so if a handful of rows fail, the rest still go through — failures are listed afterward so you can fix and re-import just those.
How leads become clients
Clients are created from the Leads section using Promote to Client — see our guide to managing leads for that side of the process.
This link is one-way: once a lead is promoted, its contacts, tasks, and notes move over to the new client record, but there's no built-in way to send a client back to being a lead.
Promotion is safe to re-run — if a lead is already linked to a client, promoting it again won't create a duplicate.
A few tips
Fill in a client's address as soon as you have it — it's used behind the scenes to plot job locations on the Jobs day map, so accurate addresses make your scheduling view more useful automatically.
Use the Without Task filter periodically to catch clients who haven't had any activity logged in a while.
When importing, do a small test batch first if you're mapping multiple contacts per row — it's easier to fix a mapping mistake on 5 rows than on 500.
Keep the Notes Summary tab as your first stop when reopening an existing client — it's the fastest way to see what's happened recently without clicking through every tab.