Every person who brings a vehicle to your workshop is a customer record in Pistonlog. Once created, that record follows them across every future visit — their contact details, vehicles, and full jobcard history are always one click away.

What a Customer Record Stores

Each customer record holds:

Name — first and last name (both required)
Phone number — optional
Email address — optional, used for invoices and reminder emails
Address — optional, postal address for printed documents
Business name — optional free-text field for trading-as / sole-trader customers (separate from business accounts which are full company records)
Notes — internal-only free text
On stop marks a customer who shouldn't normally be booked in (a reason is required); it shows as a warning badge and must be acknowledged when creating a jobcard
Contact preferences — contactByEmail / contactBySms flags controlling whether reminders go via each channel

Customer records are company-scoped — visible across every garage you run.

Creating a Customer

There are two ways to add a customer to your garage.

From a jobcard

This is the most common route. When you create or edit a jobcard, type into the Customer field. If no match is found, click New + and fill in their details in the New Customer dialog, then click Create Customer. The customer is saved to your database immediately and linked to the jobcard.

Creating a new customer inline while building a jobcard

From the customer list

You can also add customers ahead of time — useful when onboarding a fleet account or entering records from a previous system.

Open the customer list

From the sidebar, click Customers.

Click Add Customer

Click the Add Customer button in the top-right corner.

Fill in their details

Enter the customer's name, phone, email, and address. Click Add Customer to create the record.

Creating a customer directly from the Customers page

One record, used everywhere

However you create a customer, the result is the same — a single record available across all future jobcards in your garage. You never need to enter the same person twice.

Finding an Existing Customer

The Customers page shows all customers in your company. Use the search bar at the top to find someone by name. To find a customer by phone number or email address, use the global search (Cmd/Ctrl+K) instead; it matches name, email, phone, and business name.

When adding a customer to a jobcard, the same search works inline — start typing in the Customer field and matching records appear as you type.

Finding an existing customer by name or phone number

Editing Customer Details

Phone number changed? New address? Open the customer record and update it.

Open the customer

Find the customer in your list (or click their name from any jobcard) and open their record.

Edit their details

Update any field (name, phone, email, or address) on the Info tab. Changes save automatically; a "Saved" indicator confirms each change.

Changes apply everywhere

When you update a customer's details, the change is reflected across all their linked jobcards and documents. No need to update each jobcard individually.

Viewing Customer History

Open any customer record to see their full history with your garage:

Jobcards — every jobcard ever created for this customer, with reference, status, and date (on the Previous Jobs tab)
Vehicles — all vehicles linked to this customer, split into currently and previously owned (on the Vehicles tab)

This gives your front desk a complete picture before the customer even walks through the door. You can see what was done last time, what was quoted, and which vehicle they're likely bringing in.

Browsing a customer's past jobcards and linked vehicles

Customers and vehicles

Customers and vehicles are company-scoped records linked mainly through shared jobcards, not through a direct foreign key. There's no customerId column on the vehicle — the link is per-visit: jobcard A might link "Sam" to "AB12 CDE", jobcard B (years later) might link "Jane" to the same registration.

That matches how cars are actually owned in the real world: when a car gets sold, the new owner picks it up on their next visit's jobcard, and the previous owner's history stays attached to the past jobcards. No "transfer of ownership" admin needed.

Two refinements sit on top of the jobcard-derived link:

Link Vehicle (on the customer's Vehicles tab) explicitly attaches a vehicle to a customer without booking them in.
Mark previous records that a car has changed hands: the vehicle moves to that customer's "Previously owned" list (and you can Restore it if you got it wrong). A fresh jobcard re-linking the pair clears the previous-owner mark automatically.

Vehicle history vs customer history

A customer's record shows the jobcards linked to them. A vehicle's record shows the jobcards linked to it. The two are different lenses on the same underlying jobcards. See Customer history and Vehicle job history.

In this section

Creating a customer

Three ways to add a customer — manual, inline from a jobcard, or CSV import

Contact preferences

Customers can opt in or out of email and SMS — gates reminders, payment links, and review requests

Importing customers from CSV

Move customers from another system in bulk — Pistonlog parses, validates, and creates the records

Customer history

Every jobcard a customer has ever had with you — across every garage in your company