Help & FAQ

Relay is a cable CRM and billing system: it keeps every customer, plan, set-top box and due in one place, lets you collect on your round, and shows you what came in and what is still outstanding.

Both, with the same login and the same data. The Android app is the main way to work — it is built for the collection round and keeps working without a signal. The website is useful on a computer for bigger jobs like imports, reports and settings.

Anything you do in one shows up in the other.

In this order, because each step depends on the one before it:

• Areas and streets — the geography your round follows.
• Plans — the packages you sell, with their monthly price.
• Customers — added by hand, or brought in together with Import.
• Employees — only if staff will use Relay, with the permissions you choose.

New accounts are approved by hand before they can sign in. This keeps the system free of fake operators. If it has been a while, contact support and we will look at your registration.

Every customer sits in exactly one of four states:

• Active — connected and being billed.
• Inactive — not being billed right now, but still your customer.
• Hold — temporarily paused, for example a customer away for a few months.
• Disconnected — has left. Their record stays for your records.

Disconnected customers are hidden from the Customers list but still counted in Reports, so at year end you can still answer who discontinued and when.

Set them to Disconnected — do not delete them. Deleting throws away their payment history, which you need for your own accounts and for any later dispute. Disconnected keeps the history and takes them out of your day-to-day list.

The customer code is the number you call a customer by on the round. It is built from an area-level prefix plus the order of customers along a street, so codes run in walking order instead of the order you happened to add people.

You can move or insert a customer anywhere on a street. When that renumbers the people after them, Relay shows you a preview of every change and asks you to confirm before writing anything.

A customer must have a set-top box assigned before they can be Active — an active connection with no box is a billing record with nothing behind it. Relay stops the save and takes you straight to the STB field.

Assign a box there and save again. The same rule applies when you reconnect or resume someone.

The smart card follows the box. You do not track it separately. If the box you assign is already with another customer, Relay tells you who is holding it rather than silently taking it away.

Relay reprices from the change onward. It never touches payments that have already been recorded — your collection history stays exactly as it was.

Yes — use Import on the website, which is far easier on a computer than on a phone. You map your columns to Relay’s fields and it loads them in. Get areas, streets and plans in first, so imported customers land in the right place.

Opening balance is what a customer already owed you before Relay — the arrears you carried in on day one. It exists so a customer’s true outstanding is right from the start, instead of looking like zero until the first Relay bill.

Opening balance is set once, when you first record it, and is then locked. This is deliberate and enforced on the server, not just hidden in the screen.

The reason: it is a historical fact, and an editable one silently drifted. Every ordinary save of an unrelated field used to shrink it a little, quietly changing what customers appeared to owe. Locking it ended that.

If an opening balance is genuinely wrong, contact support rather than working around it — it needs a correction, not an overwrite.

Yes, everywhere: the dashboard Pending figure, reminders, the collection round and reports all count opening balance along with unpaid bills. What you see as outstanding is the full picture.

Do not fix a wrong payment by editing figures elsewhere — that leaves the ledger disagreeing with itself. Correct it in Payments, where the entry lives, so the customer’s ledger and your reports move together.

If a payment cannot be corrected from the screen, contact support with the customer and the date. Deliberately, not everything to do with money is silently editable.

A bill is what you charged, raised from the customer’s plan. A payment is money you actually received. Outstanding is simply what has been billed (plus any opening balance) minus what has been paid.

The round is your collection walk, in order. Relay lists the stops the way you actually visit them, so you can move down the street and record each door as you go.

Record what really happened — that is the point of the round. The outcomes are:

• Collected — paid in full.
• Partial — paid some of it; the rest stays outstanding.
• Promise — said they will pay, with a date and amount you note down.
• Not home — nobody there.
• Disputed — disagrees with the amount.

Anything unresolved stays as a chip on the round list so it comes back to you instead of being forgotten.

Yes. That is what the app is for. Collect through a dead patch and it saves on the phone, then syncs by itself when you are back on the network. You do not have to do anything to make it sync.

The app works offline, but not forever — after about 12 hours with no contact with the server it asks you to reconnect. This stops two people collecting for hours against stale figures and overwriting each other.

Nothing you saved offline is lost. It is held safely and goes up as soon as you reconnect.

Yes — share it on WhatsApp or SMS the moment you collect. WhatsApp opens your own WhatsApp with the message ready, and SMS opens your phone’s messaging app — unless an SMS gateway has been set up for your account, in which case Relay sends the SMS through it.

A gateway SMS passes the customer’s number and the message to your SMS provider. Relay never messages your customers on its own — see the Privacy Policy.

Yes. Create an employee account for each person. They sign in as themselves, so you can always see who recorded what.

Two separate limits, and they work together:

• Permissions — what they may do: view customers, record payments, see reports, manage plans, and so on.
• Area and street scope — which customers they can touch at all. Someone scoped to two areas cannot see the rest, on any screen.

Scope is fail-closed: if a staff member has not been given an area, they see nothing rather than everything.

That is almost always the permission for that screen not being granted. Open Employees, check the permissions on their account, and grant the one they need. They will see the screen next time they open Relay.

The views you need to run the business: daily collection, outstanding, area-wise and staff-wise. Reports include disconnected customers, which is why they are the right place to answer year-end questions.

Pay File handles the payment file your provider gives you. You upload it, choose the rows you want to keep, and export.

The rows you keep come out byte-for-byte identical to the file you uploaded — Relay does not re-type or reformat them. That matters because providers reject files whose formatting has drifted.

Relay shows you who is due and prepares the message, but you send it — from your own WhatsApp or your phone’s SMS app, or through your SMS gateway if one has been set up for your account. Nothing goes to your customers without you tapping send.

Relay is sold as a subscription with a fixed duration. There is no auto-charge and no card on file. You pay by UPI and upload the screenshot or UTR reference; the administrator confirms it and your subscription is extended.

A 30-day free trial may be offered, one per operator or mobile number.

Features may be placed on hold until you pay, but your data is not deleted because a subscription lapsed. Renew and everything is as you left it.

No. Every operator’s data is scoped to their own account, and that scoping is applied on the server to every request, not just in the screens. Your list is yours.

• You, the operator.
• Employees you create, limited to the permissions and areas you grant them.
• The platform administrator, for support, approval and audit.
• The providers that run the service — our host, and your SMS provider for SMS sent through a gateway set up for your account.

Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Yes to both. You can request an export while your account is active, and ask for account closure at any time through support. See also account deletion.

Contact support with three things and it will be sorted much faster: what you did, what you expected, and what actually happened — plus the customer code or the date if it is about money.

sooryafssss@gmail.com