Add the customers you sell to and the vendors you buy from to one list, set how each one pays, and keep it current for your purchase and sales orders.
Real help from real food people
Chef Diego runs a real food plant. If this page didn't get you there, tell us — a person reads every message.
Contacts is the one list of every business you deal with — the vendors you buy ingredients and packaging from, and the customers you sell finished goods to. You add a contact here before a purchase order can name its vendor or a sales order its customer, so it's usually the first thing you set up in a new company. Open Contacts to add one or open one you already have.
Open the new-contact form
On the contacts list, select New. A contact belongs to the company you're working in, and the Company field is locked to it — so if this contact belongs to a different plant, switch companies in the top navigation first.
Mark it a customer, a vendor, or both
Under Contact type, check Customer, Vendor, or both. A business you both buy from and sell to is one contact with both boxes checked. This choice decides where the contact turns up later: vendors on purchase orders, customers on sales orders.
Fill in the basics
Give the contact a Name and leave its Status on Active. Add an Email and Website if you have them — a customer needs an email, since that's where its paperwork goes.
Add a phone, an address, and the people
Every contact needs at least one phone (one marked Main), one address with its fields filled in, and one person — with exactly one marked Billing Contact. Use Add phone, Add address, and Add person when a contact has more than one of each.
Set how it pays
Under Payment information, pick a Payment method — Credit, Debit, Wire, or Check — and the Payment terms you've agreed on.
Create it
Select Create. The contact opens, ready to name on an order.
Each customer and vendor carries its own — the deal you struck with it — so you set them once on the contact instead of on every order. Four options cover most food businesses:
The terms you set here follow the contact onto its orders — a vendor's terms show on its purchase orders — so you agree them once and not on every order.
The moment you check Customer, a Department field appears. Assign the customer to a department, like Logistics or Quality, and you can filter the contacts list down to one department's customers. Vendors don't carry a department.
Open a contact and select Edit — or the pencil on its row — to change anything, then Save. Editing a contact also pushes the change to Odoo if you've connected it, so the two stay in step.
To remove a contact, open Edit and, in the Danger zone, select Delete contact and confirm. That hides it from every list and lookup, its addresses, phones, and people along with it, so nobody can name it on a new order.
A deleted contact stays on its old orders
Deleting a contact doesn't erase it. The record is kept for audit, and any purchase or sales order that already named the contact still shows it. You just can't pick it for anything new.
Contacts is the directory the rest of Bettr Manager draws from. When you start a purchase order, you pick its vendor from the contacts you marked Vendor; when you start a sales order, you pick its customer from the ones you marked Customer. A contact you add here once is the same one every order picks up later, so nobody re-keys a supplier's name and terms onto each order.
Before you buy from a new vendor, you also qualify it: each vendor carries a validation record with the food-safety paperwork an auditor expects, kept on the contact alongside everything here.