Partners

A partner is a subcontractor, supplier, reseller or affiliate — an Address Book company flagged as a partner and given partner attributes. Partners are who you assign work orders to, and whose compliance you track. (The source CRM has no partner type.)

In this chapter - Flagging a company as a partner - Partner attributes - The partner's work orders and compliance - Removing the flag

The directory

Icon bar ▸ Partners. Status icon (active / prospect / suspended / inactive), filter by status, Add Partner (search the client list and flag a company). Double-click opens the partner. The toolbar's Column Setup button (left of Refresh) lets you choose, create and share the columns shown — see Chapter 20, Column setups on the TechieCRM windows.

If the company you pick is already a partner (you picked it twice, or a colleague flagged it a moment ago), no second partner record is created: what you entered is saved onto the existing partner record instead, and the confirmation says so — "This company was already a partner — your changes were saved to the existing partner record." On a plan that only allows reading and deleting, the Add Partner button is hidden from both the toolbar and the right-click menu.

Cloud CRM (Sept 2026): the web portal's Partners workspace shows every partner, from either direction, and each one now opens its own record page with the same three tabs as the desktop:

• a partner record that came from the desktop app or the cloud sync; or
• a Client tagged with Category "Partner" on the web.

Until September 2026 those were two separate lists that did not know about each other: a partner created on the desktop appeared in Compliance & SLA but was missing from Partners, and a partner created on the web had no name in Compliance & SLA's Partner column. They are one list now. A company that has both a partner record and the "Partner" category appears once.

The columns are Partner · Type · Status · Rating · Region · Phone · Email · City — the desktop panel's five, plus the three the web already showed. Type, Status, Rating and Region come from the partner record, so they are blank for a client that only carries the category: nothing has recorded a type or a status for it yet. The status colours are the desktop's own — green Active, blue Prospect, amber Suspended, grey Inactive — and they are never repainted by your workspace's brand colours, because they state a fact rather than decorate the page.

Its Add button opens the ordinary client-create form with Category pre-filled to "Partner" (still editable, so it isn't accidentally lost) — save the client and it appears in Partners. The web's Category field is new and free-text (no dropdown), matching whatever the desktop/source CRM has on that Client record.

The partner record page on the web

Open a partner and you get the desktop's three tabs — Basic, Work Orders, Compliance.

Basic shows the client's own details (name, phone, e-mail, address) read-only, with a link through to the client record where they are edited, and then the partner's own fields — type, status, rating, compliance standing, service areas, region, country, payment terms, currency, onboarding date and notes. Those you can change here, and Save writes them.

Work Orders lists every order this partner has been assigned, newest scheduled first, with the customer, the dispatch status and this partner's own role on the job. It is read-only: work orders are raised from the customer's side. If a partner is only recorded as the lead and has no assignment line of its own, the row says so rather than showing a role and an amount nobody agreed.

Compliance lists the partner's certificates, soonest expiry first, with the same "expires in 14 days" / "expired 3 days ago" wording the Compliance & SLA board uses — and it honours the same per-requirement warning window your workspace set, so the two pages never disagree about the same certificate. Certificates are added and reviewed on that board.

Flagging a client as a partner on the web

A partner is a client first, so there is no "new partner" form that creates a company. Add Partner (/partners/create/) asks you to find an existing client, then set the partner fields; saving attaches a partner record to that client. If the client's Category is blank it is set to "Partner" at the same time, so the two markers agree — and if the Category already holds something else you chose ("Supplier", say), it is left exactly as it is and the confirmation says so rather than quietly replacing it.

If the client is already a partner, nothing is written and the message says "This client is already a partner." — what you typed is not applied to the existing record. Open that record and change it there, so you can see what you are changing.

A client that carries the "Partner" category but has no partner record yet also has a record page. Its Type, Status and Rating are blank, because nothing has recorded them; pressing Save on that page is what creates the partner record.

Values the web doesn't normally offer are kept. If a partner's Type, Status, Compliance or Currency holds something that isn't in the drop-down — from an import, or from a customised desktop setup — it appears in the list marked (current) and stays selected, so saving an unrelated change never quietly rewrites it. Capitalisation counts: a stored "Active" is kept as "Active", not folded into "active".

Removing the partner flag is desktop-only for now. The web portal can add a partner record and edit one; it cannot remove one. Use the desktop's right-click ▸ Remove Partner Flag.

"client record missing". If a partner record points at a client that is not in your Address Book — a partial sync, or a client deleted after the partner was created — the row is still listed, with its Phone/Email/City blank and the words client record missing beside the name. It is never hidden and never deleted: a partner you cannot see is exactly the problem this list was fixed for.

Making the data agree (administrators). The merged list needs no change to your data. If you would rather the two markers actually matched — every tagged client given a partner record, every partner record's client given the "Partner" category — an administrator can run python manage.py reconcile_partners --tenant <your-workspace> on the server. It reports only unless --apply is added, it is safe to run twice, and there are three things it will never do on its own: it will not overwrite a Category that holds some other value you chose (such as "Supplier"), it will not delete a partner record whose client is missing, and it will not invent an Address Book id for a client that has none. Each of those is listed in its report for a person to decide.

Clients ▸ Edit ▸ Relate & Convert ▸ Convert Contacts to Partners / Convert Partners to Companies explain why neither of the source CRM's own conversions applies here (TechieCRM has no "Partner" entity type to convert a Contact into, and a Partner already is a Company, so there is nothing left to convert on the other button) and offer to open Add Partner — there is no contact-to-partner conversion of a selected record; Add Partner always searches for a company.

The partner dialog

Basic: type (subcontractor / supplier / reseller / affiliate), status, rating (0–5), service areas, region, country, payment terms, currency, onboarding date, compliance status (derived — see Chapter 11), notes. Work Orders: every order this partner has been assigned (read-only list — orders are raised from the customer side). Compliance: the partner's requirement grid — see Chapter 11; this tab is there from the moment you flag a company, before you have saved it for the first time.

The currency list offers CAD and USD. If a partner already carries some other currency — from a data import, say — that value is added to the list and shown as-is, so saving an unrelated change (a rating, a note) never quietly rewrites it. The same applies to type, status and compliance status: a stored value the drop-down does not normally offer is shown and kept, not replaced.

Removing the flag

Right-click ▸ Remove Partner Flag — the company stays in Clients; only the partner attributes go.