Create and Manage Contacts

User Personas: Admin | Project Manager

The Contact Log holds the businesses and people your projects deal with: vendors, owners, general contractors, subcontractors, architects and anyone else who receives a document from you.

Contacts are shared across your company rather than entered per project, so adding one properly once saves your team from retyping an address on every document that goes out. If your company uses market areas, what each user sees in the Contact Log is scoped to their own areas. See Contacts and Market Areas.

To perform the actions described in this article, you must have the Company - Contacts - General Permissions and Change Status permissions. See the Permissions table at the end of this article.

Use the links below to jump to a topic:

• What Contacts Are Used For
• View the Contact Log
• Create a Contact Manually
• Import Contacts
  • Import Template Fields
• Edit a Contact
• Delete a Contact
• Change a Contact Status
• Contacts and Market Areas
  • Assign Market Areas to Contacts
• Permissions
• FAQ
  • A contact is missing from a document drop-down menu.
  • A contact will not appear as a vendor on a Purchase Order.
  • I cannot delete a contact.
  • Should I delete a contact or make it unavailable?
  • My import did not work.
  • I cannot see a contact a colleague can see.
  • I get a Contact Already Exists message.

What Contacts Are Used For

A contact has to exist in the Contact Log before it can be selected anywhere else in eSUB Fusion. That is the rule behind most "why can I not find them" questions.

Where contacts appear	What it is for
To and Reply To/ Return To	Emailing documents out of a project. On General Info/Correspondence when creating documents. This information is generally used in the document's PDF generated letterhead.
Vendor	Purchase Orders. Requires the AP Vendor designation.
Billing Info and Shipping Info	Addresses printed and generated on Purchase Orders and other eSUB PDF documents.

View the Contact Log

1. Select Settings in the global navigation menu, then select Resources>Contacts in the slide-out menu
2. Use the search bar and the sort and filter options to refine the list
3. Select a contact to view it

Use the three-dot button on a contact to reach its actions without opening it first.

Create a Contact Manually

Manual entry suits adding one or two contacts as a job gets going. For a bulk load, see Import Contacts.

From the Contact Log:

1. Select Add contact on the action button
2. Fill in all required fields, plus any optional fields you want
3. Select Save

Fill in the address and email fields even when they are optional.  These are the values that print on Purchase Orders and populate email drop-down menus later, and chasing them down mid-job is slower than entering them now.

Import Contacts

Importing is the practical way to move an existing contact list into eSUB Fusion, or to add a batch of vendors at once.

From the Contact Log:

1. Select Import Contacts on the action button
2. Download the file template
3. Fill out the template with your business contacts
4. Select Choose File and upload the completed template
5. Double-click any inline field to correct it if needed
6. Select Save

Import Template Fields

Do not delete any of the columns (headers) from the import template while editing in excel. This will cause errors when uploading your contacts. Ensure that any fields in required columns are populated. If you would like to not enter information for a certain contact on fields other than required, simply leave them blank.

Import a handful of rows first and check the result before loading the full list. Correcting five imported contacts is quick; correcting five hundred is not.

Edit a Contact

From the Contact Log:

1. Select a contact to view it
   • Alternatively, use the the Edit option from the contact's 3-dot menu.
2. Select Edit and make your changes
3. Select Save

Delete a Contact

From the Contact Log:

1. Select a contact to view it
   • Alternatively, use the the Delete option from the contact's 3-dot menu.
2. Select Delete
3. Select Continue on the pop-up confirmation modal

Only unused contacts can be deleted. Once a contact has been used on a document, deleting it would break that historical record, so make it unavailable instead. See Change a Contact Status.

Change a Contact Status

Making a contact unavailable removes it from selection going forward while leaving every document that already used it intact. This is what you want for a vendor you no longer buy from.

From the Contact Log:

1. Select a contact to view it
   • Alternatively, use the the Edit option from the contact's 3-dot menu.
2. Select Edit and use the toggle on the Status field
3. Select Save

For how availability works across eSUB Fusion, see the Available and Unavailable Statuses article.

Contacts and Market Areas

If your company uses market areas, contacts can be assigned to one or more of them, and the Contact Log is scoped to what each user is entitled to see. This is the usual explanation when two people look at the same Contact Log and see different lists.

A Market Areas column, with sorting and filtering, appears on the Contact Log once your company has two or more market areas defined. Below that, the column is hidden because there is nothing to choose between.

The same scoping applies to the contact pickers throughout eSUB Fusion, so a contact you cannot see in the log will not appear in a document drop-down menu either.

Every user and crew member has a linked internal contact, these internal contacts will however not be shown in the Contact Log, and their market areas are kept in sync with it automatically. Changing a user's market areas updates their internal contact as well. See Create and Manage Users and Crew Members for updating the User or Crew Member's information.

Assign Market Areas to Contacts

A contact's market areas can be set individually, or in bulk when you are setting up.

On a single contact:

1. Select a contact to view it
   • Alternatively, use the the Edit option from the contact's 3-dot menu.
2. Select Edit and use the Market Areas field to select one or more areas
3. Select Save

The field is optional and can be cleared. Only market areas marked as available, and available to you, appear in the list. In view mode the assigned areas are shown as chips.

To assign in bulk, use the Assign Contacts tab from Market Areas in the Company Settings slide-out, which shows all contacts in a grid with their current market areas and a search bar to narrow the list. 

Select the rows you want and use the bulk assign button, or run it against everything currently shown. Before it applies, you are shown how many contacts will get a new assignment, how many will have an existing one overwritten, and how many already have the area you picked.

For more information on bulk-assigning contacts, see Market Areas.

Search or filter the list first, then use bulk assign on what is showing. Assigning market areas to a filtered set of vendors is far quicker than opening each contact, and the confirmation summary tells you exactly what is about to change before it happens.

Permissions

If a user cannot see an action described in this article, review their Contacts permissions. Admins manage these from User Permissions.

FAQ

A contact is missing from a document drop-down menu.

Check that the contact exists in the Contact Log and that its status is available. A contact set to unavailable stays on historical documents but no longer appears for selection.

A contact will not appear as a vendor on a Purchase Order.

The contact is not designated as an AP Vendor. Edit the contact and set that designation, or enter Yes in the AP Vendor column if you are importing.

I cannot delete a contact.

It has been used on at least one document. Deleting it would break that record, so set it to unavailable instead.

Should I delete a contact or make it unavailable?

Make it unavailable in almost every case. Deletion is really only for a duplicate or a typo caught before the contact has been used anywhere.

My import did not work.

Check that every row has a Business Name and a Business Type, and that each Business Type is one of the six accepted values spelled exactly as listed. Those two columns are required and are the usual cause. See Import Template Fields.

I cannot see a contact a colleague can see.

The contact is most likely assigned to a market area you are not. You see contacts in your own market areas plus any contact with no market area at all. See Contacts and Market Areas.

I get a Contact Already Exists message.

A contact with that email address already exists in a market area you cannot see. Rather than create a duplicate, eSUB Fusion offers to assign the existing contact to your market areas, which keeps its current assignments intact.

See also: Available and Unavailable Statuses · Purchase Orders