Billing addresses
Store separate addresses for billing.
Before you start
Two places carry a billing address
planni has two different things that are both called "billing address", and the difference between them is the most important point in this article:
- The address book on a contact or a company: reusable master data that you create once and can edit or delete at any time afterwards.
- The billing address of a single order: the details captured at checkout and saved permanently on that one order.
The two are not automatically linked. What that means for you is covered below.
Where the address book shows up
Both the contact and the company detail page show a "Billing addresses" area. A contact and a company each keep their own address book, independent of the billing address of any order.
If a contact has no billing address of its own but is linked to a company that has a default address, planni shows that address on the contact page instead, with a reference to the company. That card is read-only because the address belongs to the company.
Adding a billing address to the address book
Step by step
Open the contact or company and click + add in the "Billing addresses" area.
Fill in name, street, postal code, city and country. These fields are required, enter the country as a two-letter code, for example DE.
Optionally add company, house number, address addition, VAT ID and email address.
Optionally give it a label, such as "Head office" or "Accounting", to tell several addresses apart.
Check "Use as default" if needed.
Several addresses and the default one
A contact or a company can keep several billing addresses in its address book. Exactly one of them carries the "Default" badge. Mark another address as default and planni removes the badge from the previous one automatically.
For the very first address of a contact or company, "Use as default" is checked and cannot be unchecked, because there is no other address yet that could be the default instead.
Editing and deleting
Use the icons on each address to change or remove it. planni asks for confirmation before deleting.
Editing or deleting an address in the address book never affects orders that were already completed with that address. The reason is covered in the next section.
Billing addresses and orders
Why an order keeps its own snapshot
This is the most important point: as soon as a customer enters a billing address at checkout, planni copies those details onto the order, as a snapshot of that moment. From then on that copy is independent of the contact's or company's address book.
That holds in both directions:
- Editing or deleting an address book entry later leaves the billing address of every already-completed order unchanged.
- Editing the billing address directly on a single order (on the order detail page, via the pencil icon) only affects that one order, never the contact's or company's address book.
If a customer moves or their VAT number changes, that only affects future orders. Orders that are already completed keep the address that applied when they were placed, as accurate billing requires.
Where to change which address
| To change | Go to | Affects |
|---|---|---|
| An address book entry on a contact/company | Contact or company detail page, "Billing addresses" area | Future use of the address book, no existing orders |
| The billing address of an order | Order detail page, "Billing information" area | Only that one order |
Sensible next steps
- Find the address stored on a specific order under order details.
- How the address is captured during checkout is covered in checkout.
When something does not work
"Save" stays inactive
Name, street, postal code, city and country are required, and the country must be exactly two letters. Check whether one of these fields is still empty.
The contact has no address of its own, yet one appears
That is the inherited default address of the linked company. It is read-only because it belongs to the company. If you want a separate address for the contact, create a new one via + add.
An old order shows a different address than the address book
That is not a bug. The order shows the snapshot from the moment it was placed, the address book shows the current state. The two are allowed to drift apart.