A Contact is an individual or organisation that is the “other” party in a financial transaction. Contacts may include suppliers, contractors, customers, retail stores, and employees - anyone you pay money to, or receive money from (referred to as “trade debtors” and “trade creditors” in the accounting world). Contacts appear in the “Contact” field on reports and transaction add & edit screens.
Begins With - You can limit the list to display only those contacts whose Organisation, Family Name or Given Name begins with a letter selected from the list. Choose the filter type from the drop-down list, and then click the letter that you wish to filter using.
Show Inactive Contacts - By default contacts that have been set to inactive are not displayed in the list. Tick this option to also show a list of inactive Contacts that match your filter criteria.
Show - When the required settings have been selected click the ‘Show’ button to update the contact list.
Filtering Your List Using Tags
| Include All Tags | all records that have the tags selected from the tag cloud in the tag picker. So if tag A AND B is selected then all records that have A AND B assigned to them will be returned. |
| Include Any Tags | any records that have the tags selected from the tag cloud in the tag picker. So if tag A AND B is selected then all records that have A OR B assigned to them will be returned. |
| Exclude All Tags | all records that have the tags selected from the tag cloud in the tag picker. So if tag A AND B is selected then all records having A AND B assigned to them will be excluded. |
| Exclude Any Tags | any records that have the tags selected from the tag cloud in the tag picker. So if tag A AND B is selected then all records having A OR B assigned to them will be excluded. |
If you have a very long contact list you can set the “Do not display contact list on first view” preference to allow you to first set up your filters before displaying your list of contacts. Click On Settings in the top menu and choose Contacts to set this.
Exporting Contacts
You can export (save) the contact list to a number of different file formats suitable for importing into a variety of different accounting, contact management, and email applications -
- Adjust the list filters to retrieve the list of contacts you wish to export.
- To export active contacts, locate the ‘Export for’ option about the active contacts list and select the application that you wish to import your contacts into from the drop down list. To export inactive contacts check the ‘Show inactive contacts’ check box and use the export function above the Inactive Contacts list.
- Click the Export button next to the ‘Export for’ drop down list.
- A window will pop up with the title ‘Downloading File’ and after a few seconds (possibly longer if you are exporting a large number of contacts) a dialog should appear asking where you would like to save the file. Follow the prompts to save the file to your computer.
Once the file has been saved to you computer you can use your chosen applications’ import feature to import the contacts.
Contact notes are not included in any of the export formats, and not all formats contain all information relating to a contact. The CSV option contains all of the contact information except contact notes and is best used if you wish to make a full backup of your contact list.
Add a Contact - Click the Add icon at the top of the list to add a new contact to the list.
You can quickly add the basic information related to a contact when you are entering a transaction by clicking the plus icon next to the contact drop-down list on the transaction entry screen.
Edit a Contact
Click the pencil icon next to the item you wish to edit in the list to bring up the edit screen for that contact.
Delete or de-activate a Contact
Click the delete icon next to the item you wish to delete in the list and then follow the prompts to delete the contact.
Inactive Contacts - The Inactive Contacts will only appear if you have checked the “Show Inactive Contacts” checkbox in the list filters. This is a list of Contacts that you have previously used when entering transactions, but that you no longer do regular business with. By setting a Contact to inactive they no longer appear in the drop-down lists for transaction editing and report settings etc. You can later re-activate the Contact by clicking the edit icon next to the Contact and ticking the “Reactivate this Contact” check box and saving the Contact.
Sending Email to a Contact - If a Contact has an email address it will appear in the list as a link that will open your default email program with the Contact’s email address pre-filled. If your system does not support this feature, you can copy the email address by selecting the email address text and copying it into the ‘To’ field of a new message in your chosen email program.
