A business account record holds the company-level information for a fleet or trade customer.
Account-level fields
The businessAccounts table is lean:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | What appears on the invoice |
| Address | Single field — the company's billing address |
| Notes | Internal-only |
Archiving an account
There's no active/inactive switch to flip. When a business account is finished with, open it and use Archive (the confirmation reads "Archive business account?").
Archiving does two things:
- The account disappears from the Businesses list, and from the pickers that read it. Its record and its contacts are kept, so historical references still resolve.
- The link is cleared from every jobcard that carried the account. Those jobcards stay, but they no longer show the business.
Archiving unlinks past jobcards
The second effect surprises people. Archiving isn't just a tidy-up of the list: a jobcard billed to that business stops showing the business afterwards. If you only want the account out of the way for new bookings, consider leaving it in place.
Phones and emails
Phones and emails are not stored as columns on the account itself. Instead, the related businessContactInfo table holds labelled key-value pairs — so you can add a "Switchboard" phone, an "Accounts" email, a "Mobile (Fleet Manager)" number, etc. Each entry has:
- A label (free text — "Accounts", "Switchboard", "After hours")
- A value (the phone number or email)
- A sort order
This is more flexible than a single phone+email pair, and it survives team changes — when the "Accounts" person leaves you just update the value behind that label. The labels also matter for billing: when Pistonlog emails an invoice for a business jobcard, it picks the entry whose label contains "finance" (falling back to the first email in the list).
The finance row has to hold a real email address
Only entries that look like a valid email address are considered. A "Finance" row holding a phone number, a name, or a half-typed address is skipped entirely and the invoice goes to the first valid email on the account instead. If invoices are landing with the wrong person, check that row first.
Contacts and vehicles aren't on the account
Contacts and vehicles each have their own records. Contacts link to the account via businessContacts.businessAccountId; vehicles link through shared jobcards (the jobcard carries businessAccountId), not via a direct vehicle → business FK.
VAT number
VAT numbers belong to your own garage and company settings (the garage's VAT number is used on invoices, falling back to the company's), not to individual business accounts. If a business account customer needs their own VAT number on the printed invoice today, it'd go in the account's notes or address fields rather than a dedicated column.
How this differs from a private customer
A private customer record has firstName + lastName + a single phone and email and a flat address. A business account has a company name and address but pushes phones/emails out to a separate labelled table — reflecting that a company usually has many ways to be reached.