---
title: Customers
description: Customers are the client organizations whose sites and equipment you manage: a name plus the addresses that Locations attach to, used across Locations and tenant billing.
source: https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/platform/customers
---

# Customers

A Customer is the client whose buildings and equipment your Organization looks after: a property owner, a tenant, a managed account. The Customers pages keep that directory, one record per client with the postal addresses that Locations attach to, so the rest of the platform can answer "whose site is this?".

> **Workflow Stage: Connect**

## Overview

Customers is reached from the Settings page rather than the main sidebar: open **Settings**, find the **Customers** card ("Track the customers that own your locations and assets.") and click **Manage**, which lands on the customers list at `/administration/customers`.

The feature is deliberately small. A customer record is a name; each customer then carries a list of addresses; and a Location can point at one of those addresses. That is the whole surface, and it is enough to tag every site and every submetered tenant with the client behind it.

![The Customers list in ControlCom Connect showing client organizations with their last modified dates](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/images/customers/01-customers-list.png)

*The Customers list, reached from Settings*

## How Customers Fit the Data Model

The chain runs from your Organization down to the equipment: an Organization has Customers, a Customer has Addresses, a Location can attach to an Address, and Devices and Assets sit on Locations. Ownership is therefore indirect. An Asset belongs to a customer because it sits on a Location whose address belongs to that customer, and there is no direct customer field on Devices or Assets.

Two features consume the chain. The Location form's **Customer Settings** card ties a Location to a customer and one of that customer's addresses, and Energy Management's tenant billing bills a customer, as the **Subtenant**, for the energy its feeders record. A customer is your client, not your ControlCom account: platform billing lives on the Organization and is unrelated to this page.

## The Customers List

The list shows every customer in the Organization, sorted by name, with a **Last Modified** column. The search box (**Search customers…**) filters by name as you type, the column and density toggles adjust the table, and the export button writes the current rows to a file.

Clicking a row, or **Open** in the row actions, opens the customer. The row menu's **Edit** goes to the same place. There is no delete: a customer record stays once created, which keeps historical Locations and billing accounts pointing at a real name.

## Creating a Customer

Click **New Customer** to open the **Create Customer** dialog. It asks for exactly one thing, the **Name**, described in the form as "the legal business name or any unique identifier". Names must be at least 5 characters.

![The Create Customer dialog with its single Name field](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/images/customers/02-create-customer.png)

*Creating a customer takes one field*

**Create** saves the record and opens its **Settings** tab, where the same form renames the customer later with **Save**. Addresses are added afterwards from the **Addresses** tab; the create dialog has no address step.

## Addresses

Each customer page has two tabs, **Settings** and **Addresses**. The Addresses tab lists the customer's postal addresses with the street line and city shown per row and the country alongside.

![The Addresses tab of a customer listing its street addresses and countries](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/images/customers/03-customer-addresses.png)

*A customer with three addresses*

**New Address** opens a dialog with the usual postal fields: **Address Line 1**, **Address Line 2**, **City**, **State / Province / Region**, **Zip / Postal Code** and **Country** (a searchable list, defaulting to the United States). **Create** adds the address; the row menu's **Edit** reopens the same form with **Update** as the action.

![The address dialog with street, city, state, zip and country fields](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/images/customers/04-create-address.png)

*Adding an address to a customer*

An address is what a Location actually attaches to, so a customer with several sites gets one address per site. Deleting is not offered here either; correct an address with Edit instead.

## Where Customers Appear

The directory pays off outside its own pages. When creating or editing a Location, expand the **Customer Settings** card and pick a **Customer**; the **Address** selector then offers that customer's addresses. From then on the Location, and everything on it, is attributable to the client.

In Energy Management, a tenant billing account names a customer as its **Subtenant**, the party billed for the energy recorded by the account's feeders. The billing tables show the customer's name in the Subtenant column.

## Permissions

| Permission                 | Grants                                           |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------ |
| `Customers.ReadCustomers`  | Opening the Customers pages                      |
| `Customers.CreateCustomer` | The **New Customer** button                      |
| `Customers.UpdateCustomer` | Editing a customer, adding and editing addresses |

## Related Workflow Stages

Customers belong to the same structural groundwork as [Locations](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/platform/locations): set both up while Connecting your sites, before Devices start Collecting data, and the attribution flows through everything built later. Downstream, the payoff shows up in the Report stage, where tenant billing statements and site reports carry the right client, and on the [Map](https://documentation.controlcomtech.com/platform/map), where every Location you tagged is a client site you can point to.