Not sure if this is a bug or not but something which I think may need looked into.
I have used the “advanced search” to look for a client and put in the telephone number of the client - NO results shown?
I eventually found my client by going through the “all clients” list and there IS a telephone number listed on their details.
It would appear that the advanced search ONLY searches the telephone numbers when CONTACT information has been added - which you cannot do without an email address and not all clients provide an email addy.
When setting up a new client the telephone number was added but as the invoices are sent via snail mail no other “contact” info (email etc) needed to be added.
Surely if this is an “advanced” search it should search both the client AND the contact information?
From my point of view, all my clients telephone numbers are set up with NO space between the dialing code and the 6-digit main number (landlines and mobiles). Searching the number as a continuous string certainly returns results, but it will not if you put a space in. Check how your client phone numbers have been set up and aim for consistency across the board.
On the email situation - where my clients don’t bother with the electronic side of QF (i.e. the are just cash payers), I simply set them up with a ‘pretend’ email address just to raise the client entry in the system, e.g. fred@test.com That will suffice.
The telephone number search works at the contact level only. The telephone number field for the client as a whole was added later and this isn’t picked up in the search. For now I’ve switched this to a feature request and we will track this going forward.
Thanks again Glenn - very much appreciated as usual. Gardenman - it was the phone number in the “client” area not the “contact” area that was causing some search problems. Glenn has noted it and could be implemented in the future.
We’re now including the telephone number configured for the main client record in the search. Previously it was only picking up those numbers configured for the client contacts.
It will accept partial numbers and it is sensitive to spacing, so any spacing in the main record would need to be replicated in the way you search.