Contacts

The process

Every contact moves down these steps in order.

What it records

These fields come with the template. Add your own, rename them, or delete the ones you do not use.

• Nametext
• Companytext
• Emailemail
• Phonephone
• Address line 1text
• Address line 2text
• Suburb or citytext
• State or regiontext
• Postcodetext
• Countrytext
• Preferred contact methoddropdown
• How they found ustext
• Notesnotes

Step by step

The documentation below ships with the template. It is what your team reads on the step itself while they are doing the work, not a manual filed somewhere else.

1. 01

   Active

   Someone you currently deal with. This is where nearly every contact sits.

   Required before the job can move on

   • Name

   Also on this step, but optional: Company, Email, Phone, Address line 1, Address line 2, Suburb or city, State or region, Postcode, Country, Preferred contact method, How they found us, Notes.

   Purpose

   This is the organisation's Contacts stream. Every person or company you deal with belongs here once, and every other stream points at them from here.

   What to capture

   Name is required. It is what every other record shows when it names this contact, so a blank one leaves jobs pointing at nothing readable.

   Preferred contact method is worth setting while you are talking to them. It is the difference between a customer who reads what you send and one who never sees it.

   Everything else is optional, but an email address is worth chasing: automations that email the customer read it from this record, so filling it in once saves adding an address field to every job stream.

   Rules

   • One record per person or company. Before adding someone, search first - a duplicate contact splits their history in two, and neither half tells you the truth.

   • Correct the contact here rather than on the job. A job holds a link to this record, not a copy of it, so fixing a phone number here fixes it everywhere from that point on.

   • Use Notes for context that has no field of its own: who introduced them, what they care about, what went wrong last time.

2. 02

   Archived

   No longer active. Kept for history, and kept out of the picker.

   Also on this step, but optional: Notes.

   Purpose

   A contact you no longer deal with: they have moved on, the business has closed, or they asked not to be contacted again.

   Why move them rather than delete them

   Their history matters. Every job, quote and invoice that names them keeps working, and the record stays readable when someone opens a two-year-old job to see what happened.

   Before you move someone here

   Write in Notes why. "Closed down, March", "asked us to stop contacting them", "moved to a competitor" are all things the next person needs and cannot guess.