--- title: "Updating customer details" description: "Addresses, passports, related persons, notification settings, the language you write to them in, and how to archive a customer you no longer deal with." lastModified: "2026-10-15" lang: "en" wordCount: 2460 url: https://qualyhq.com/training/customers/updating-customer-details --- ## Site navigation - [For schools](/international-education/for-schools.md) — For international education schools - [For agents](/international-education/for-education-agents.md) — For international education agents - [Explore](/training.md) — Watch videos on how to use Qualy - [About](/about.md) — Learn about Qualy's mission and values - [Pricing](/pricing) - [5-min demo](/demo.md) - [Login](https://dashboard.qualyhq.com) # Updating customer details > The Profile and settings section — what each editor holds, and which changes affect more than the record. ## At a glance - **Intended for:** Everyone - **Available in:** All plans - **Reading time:** 6 minutes - **Last updated:** 16th September 2026 ## Quick summary Name, email and phone are edited by clicking them in the card at the top of the customer. Everything else lives in the Profile and settings section, which opens nine small editors: the profile itself, your custom fields, addresses, passports and other IDs, related persons, the customer number, notification settings, language, and archiving. Three of them do more than store information — the email address is what Qualy matches customers on, the language decides what language reminders are written in, and archiving takes the customer out of search and out of the payment picker without deleting anything. ## Overview There are two places to change a customer's details, and the split is about how often you need them. Name, email and phone are edited by clicking straight on them in the card at the top of the customer — no form, no Save button. Everything else lives in **Profile & settings**, a section on the customer's page that opens nine small editors. Most of them just store information. Three of them change how Qualy behaves, and those are the ones worth reading properly: the email address, the language, and archiving. ## The quick edits Click the name, email or phone in the card at the top. It turns into a field, you type, and it saves when you click away. Escape cancels. The email is validated as you go — an address that isn't a valid email won't save, which stops half-typed corrections from going in silently. ## Profile & settings Click the section to open it. It shows a completion percentage for the record and a **Missing fields** tooltip listing what's absent, then the rows below. Each opens its own editor. ![The Profile and settings section expanded, showing a completion badge and rows for Profile, custom fields, Addresses, Passports and other IDs, Related persons, Advanced options, notifications and Language preferences](/images/training/customers/updating-customer-details/01-profile-and-settings-rows.png) ### Profile Name, email, phone, and the details that don't fit anywhere else: a nickname, date of birth, gender, and which messaging app the customer uses — WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and others. The email is required here as it is everywhere else. ### Your custom fields If your organisation has set up custom fields for customers, each group appears as its own row. Editing one group leaves the others untouched. ### Addresses As many as you need, each with a type — Primary, Secondary, Office, Mailing, Emergency or Other — a country, and the usual street, city, state and postcode. The country is the only part that's required. Use **'Add another'** for each extra address. Addresses aren't decoration. Some payment methods ask the payer for an address at checkout as a compliance step, and some gateways refuse the payment without one. An address on file is one less thing for a student to get stuck on while trying to pay you. ### Passports and other IDs Passport, visa, national ID, birth certificate, resident permit, driver's licence, tax ID, student ID, employee ID and more. Each holds a number, the issuing country, issue and expiry dates, and a note. The type and country are required on each one. Add as many as you need. You won't always have to type them. When a passport, national ID, visa or birth certificate is uploaded to a customer's **Documents**, Qualy reads it in the background — usually within a day — and fills in what's missing here. It only fills gaps: an ID with a number that's already on the customer gains any missing country, issue or expiry date; a new number is added as a new row. It never changes a value someone typed, and never touches the customer's name. On passports, national IDs and visas with a machine-readable zone, Qualy checks the number, date of birth and expiry against the zone's check digits before using them. An empty date of birth, phone or gender on the profile can be filled from the same document. ### Related persons A parent, a partner, a friend, a colleague — with a name, email, phone and note. A related person is a description, not an account. They have no portal login, they can't be sent a payment, and they don't appear anywhere as a customer. If the parent is the one actually paying and needs an invoice or portal access, they have to be a customer in their own right. ### Advanced options The customer number. Qualy assigns a sequential one at creation; replace it with your own student ID if you'd rather Qualy and your student system used the same reference. Numbers have to be unique — Qualy refuses a number that's already on somebody else rather than moving it. ### Emails & text message notifications This is per customer, not a global setting. Every notification Qualy can send is listed under a heading — Direct debit, Payments, Orders, Refunds, Support, Messages — with a column for email and a column for text message. Untick what this customer shouldn't get. Some are marked **'Always on'** and can't be switched off, because a payer has to receive them. Where a notification can't be sent by a particular channel, that box is greyed rather than missing. There's no Save button. It saves a moment after each change, so make your changes and leave. ### Language preferences The language Qualy writes to this customer in, and how dates, times and calendars are formatted for them. Eleven languages. This drives their payment reminders, their receipts, their overdue notices, and their portal. Setting it correctly is the difference between a student reading your reminder and ignoring it. The customer can change this from their own portal, and it's the same setting — whichever of you changed it most recently is what's in effect. ### Removal and archival The bottom row, in red. It holds one dropdown: **Active** or **Archived**. Change it and Save. ## Archiving, precisely Archiving is the closest thing Qualy has to deleting a customer, and the difference matters. An archived customer stops appearing in search and can't be selected when you create a payment. Their history — payments, receipts, commission, documents — stays exactly as it was, because that history still has to add up in your reporting and your accounts. It's reversible. Set the status back to Active and they come back. You can't archive a customer who still has live payments. If anything is due, overdue, part-paid, awaiting review or processing, Qualy refuses and tells you why. Collect, cancel or refund what's outstanding first. Archived customers still appear in the Customers list — filter by Status if you want to see only one or the other. And if you archived somebody and now can't find them when creating a payment, that's the archiving working as intended rather than a customer going missing. ## What editing can't fix If the same student exists in Qualy twice — two records, two sets of payments, two portal logins — editing one of them won't help. That's a merge, and it has [its own guide](/training/customers/merging-duplicate-customers.md). ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I delete a customer that has already been created? You archive them rather than deleting them. Open the customer, go to Profile and settings, and at the bottom you will find Removal and archival — set the status to Archived and Save. The customer stops appearing in search and can no longer be picked when you create a payment, but their history stays intact, which matters because payments, receipts and commission attached to them still need to make sense. It is reversible: set the status back to Active the same way. Qualy has no button that permanently destroys a customer and their history, and that is deliberate. ### Why will Qualy not let me archive a customer? Because they still have live payments. If any payment for that customer is due, overdue, part-paid, awaiting review or still processing, Qualy blocks the change and tells you so. Deal with the payments first — collect them, cancel them, or refund them — and the customer will archive once nothing is outstanding. This is what stops money quietly disappearing from your reporting because somebody tidied up a record. ### I need to change a customer's email address — is that safe? Yes, and you can do it by clicking the email in the card at the top of the customer, or through the Profile editor. Know what else it moves, though: email is what Qualy identifies customers by, so it is what imports match on, what your accounting and CRM integrations match on, and where the customer's portal login link is sent. Change it and future reminders and login links go to the new address. If you are correcting a typo, change it. If the student has genuinely moved to a new address and you have already been sending things to the old one, change it and then check that the last few emails were actually delivered, in the Notes and activities panel. ### Can I stop Qualy emailing one particular customer without changing anything for everyone else? Yes — Emails & text message notifications, inside Profile and settings, controls that one customer only. Each notification has an email column and a text message column, and you untick what you do not want them to receive. Untick both and they stop getting that notification altogether. Some are marked 'Always on' and cannot be turned off, because they are the ones a payer has to receive. There is no Save button on this editor: it saves itself a moment after each change. ### What are related persons — can a parent listed there log in or pay? No. Related persons are descriptive information on the customer record — a parent, a partner, a friend, a colleague, with their name, email, phone and a note. They are not customers, they have no portal login, and they cannot be sent a payment. Use them to record who else is involved with a student. If a parent is the one actually paying and you need to bill them, invoice them, or give them portal access, they need to be a customer in their own right. ### Where do I put the student ID the school gave us, so it appears on the commission invoice? Not on the customer. That number is per school rather than per student, so it belongs to the partnership: turn the option on in that school's Preferences, and a field for the number appears when you add a payment split. Qualy remembers it afterwards, so you only enter it once. The customer number in Advanced options is a different thing — it is your own reference for that customer inside Qualy. ### What is the customer number for, and can I change it later? It is your reference for that customer, and yes — Advanced options, inside Profile and settings. Qualy gives every customer a sequential number when they are created, and you can replace it with your own student ID so that Qualy and your student system agree on what to call somebody. Numbers must be unique across your customers: if the one you type is already in use, Qualy tells you rather than moving it. It is also what imports and reports fall back on when they cannot match a customer by email. ### How do I change what language Qualy writes to a customer in? Language preferences, inside Profile and settings. It controls the language of every notification that customer receives — reminders, receipts, overdue notices — and the language their portal renders in, along with how dates and times are formatted for them. Eleven languages are available. The customer can change this themselves by logging into their portal, and your setting and theirs are the same setting, so the most recent change wins. ### Where do I add a passport or visa number? Passports and other IDs, inside Profile and settings. You can hold as many as you need — passport, visa, national ID, driver's licence, tax ID, student ID and others — each with its number, the country that issued it, issue and expiry dates, and a note. The type and the issuing country are required on each one; the rest is optional. Use 'Add another' for each additional document. ### Passport details appeared on a customer that nobody typed in — where did they come from? From a document uploaded to that customer. When a passport, national ID, visa or birth certificate lands in a customer's Documents, Qualy reads it in the background, usually within a day, and fills in whatever is missing under Passports and other IDs — plus an empty date of birth, phone or gender on the profile. It only fills gaps: it never overwrites something a person typed, never changes the customer's name, and matches existing IDs by number so the same passport isn't added twice. On documents with a machine-readable zone, the number, date of birth and expiry are checked against its check digits first. That check catches misreads, not forgeries. If a filled-in value is wrong, edit or remove it like any other row. ### Why does the profile show a completion percentage, and does it matter? It counts how much of the customer record is filled in — name, email, phone, at least one address and at least one ID — and the Missing fields tooltip tells you which of those are absent. Nothing breaks at a low percentage. It is there because some payment methods and some compliance checks ask for an address or an ID at the moment somebody tries to pay, and it is faster to fill those in now than while a student is stuck on a checkout page. ### I removed an address by mistake and saved — can I get it back? No. Addresses, IDs and related persons save as a complete set, so removing a row and saving removes it for good, with no confirmation step and nothing to undo. Re-enter it. When you are tidying up a customer with several addresses on file, it is worth being sure which one you are removing before you save. ### Who is allowed to change customer details? Anyone who can open the customer can open these editors. Whether the change is accepted is decided by your Qualy role — the customer editing permissions under Users and permissions come in three widths: only customers you own, only your team's, or everyone's. If you can see a customer but your role does not cover editing them, the save is refused. Talk to whoever administers your Qualy account if you need a wider permission. ## Prefer doing this via the Qualy API? Head over to our developer docs for everything you need—endpoints, examples, and simple how-tos. 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