Contacts

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The notion of contact is central in Gestan. It is to the contacts that most of the other elements managed by Gestan are attached: invoices, actions, projects, etc.

Contacts are normally natural persons, but you can register legal entities there.

They may or may not be attached to the legal entities to which they belong.

Contacts are classified into four groups, depending on your business relationship:

• customers: the contacts you bill
• prospects: those to whom you have made a proposal
• partners, services, service providers (PSP): all contacts with whom you maintain a professional relationship without notion of invoicing
• Contacts without a professional relationship.

A contact can only belong to one of these groups, but there are other segmentation criteria:

• the categories of contacts (20 possible categories): a contact can be part of one or more categories
• kinds of contacts (unlimited): it is possible to define a kind of contact, possibly associated with a color
• types of contact (unlimited)
• configurable additional fields: you can manage 5 additional text fields, 5 numeric, 5 dates, 5 Booleans, and 5 combos.

Access: via the Contact button or the Contacts menu → Contacts list → All contacts

The display of the tabs at the bottom of the list is determined by the user options settings.

You can select a search type with the 1 combo, and specify criteria in the 2 field. The last two options in the combo allow you to carry out multi-criteria searches.

The address displayed in the list (columns Address, Postal Code, City) is the business address if the contact is a Business customer, or the personal address if the customer is an individual. You can change this display mode via the table context menu options (see below).

The Print button gives access to multiple “Contact” reports, address book, paper clip, envelopes, etc. It also gives access, via the “Export contacts” option, to a more complete export file generation program than that available using Excel export on the table.

The Call button allows you to make a call by softphone, whatsapp, skype, or a PABX.

The Write to button will generate an automatic email, which will be displayed in the Document tab.

Multiselection on the contact list. You can select several contacts at once, and perform an operation for these contacts, such as writing a letter. Simply click on the first contact you want, then use Ctrl+click for the other contacts you want.

Via the context menu of the search field 2, the Phonetic search allows you to find CHURCHILL by typing CHEURCHILLE, for example.

Configure search opens a search settings screen, which has options that allow you to speed up searches, particularly in the event of a slow network or high volume .

Send an email: allows you to send an email to the selected contact.

Send a letter: allows you to send a letter via Gestan's internal generator. Preferable to generating a Word or RTF mail.

Send an SMS: requires prior opening of an account with a sending platform, such as lesms.com, clickatel, or reach-interactive.

Emailing, direct mail allows you to trigger an emailing or direct mail for selected contacts.

Clipboard Memo: This option copies the contact information to the clipboard. All you have to do is Ctrl+V in another application to retrieve their full contact details. Very useful when you are asked by email for contact details.

Show Map allows you to display the contact on a map (via Google Maps - Now requires an API key)

Duplicate contact: makes a copy of the selected contact.

Anomalies: Displays anomalies possibly linked to the contact, if anomaly management has been activated.

Geolocate the selection: allows you to locate the selection on a map.

It is possible to create an action or create a scheduled action for the selected contact, or to create a Rental for the contact, if rental management is activated.

The practical information allows to display certain contact information, to search directories, etc.

The commercial information presents in particular the customer balance, the evolution of turnover, the invoice statement. In this menu, the Recompletion option allows you to open a screen with a view to printing the recompletion sheet to be provided for the customer, that is to say the list of products which, depending on the previous parts, should be part of the customer's next orders.

Show allows you to activate the display filter by broad type of contact: customers, prospects, partners and individuals.

Show Address allows you to select the address you want to display in the Address, Postal Code, City columns. You can display the professional, personal, delivery, billing, or other type of address. If you choose “contextual”, the personal address will be displayed if your contact is an individual, or the professional address if your contact is a professional.

The screen options allow you to display, or not, the archived contacts.

The tabs of the contact sheet are all configurable: you may wish to manage personal data or professional data, or both, you may manage commercial data or not, etc.

This tab is displayed if a professional data management option has been selected in the general settings.

A click on the icon placed in 1 allows you to manage the confidentiality of the file: free access, read only, or reduced access. If the file is read-only, only the person who created it will be able to modify it. If it is in reduced access, only the person who created it will be able to access it.

You can simply enter a company name, or select the company to which the contact is attached, via the 2 magnifying glass. Prefer this second option if you plan to save many contacts belonging to the same company.

Right-clicking on the date of birth of contact 2 allows you to create a birthday reminder for this contact.

The 3 switches allow you to specify whether the contact is an individual or a company, and, in the case where it is an individual, whether it is a PSP (partners, services, service providers ), a prospect, or a customer.

Clicking on the 4 icon displays a map corresponding to the address (Google service, linked to possession of a key).

Clicking on the 5 link opens the registration screen for the different email addresses corresponding to the contact.

This tab is displayed if a personal data management option has been selected in the general settings.

If the option has been checked in the general settings, it is possible to save the list and date of birth of the children. You can manage more data (2 text areas, a numeric area, a Boolean, a date and a combo), via additional child fields.

Birthday reminders. Right-clicking on the contact's date of birth creates a birthday reminder for that contact.

This tab is displayed if the “Manage commercial data” option is checked in the general settings.

Customer type: You can declare an unlimited number of customer types, via the generic labels screen.

This segmentation by type is also of accounting interest: it makes it possible to manage the allocation in differentiated third-party accounts, according to the types of customers, when exporting double entry entries (XIMPORT export). For example, when you make an invoice for a “normal” customer, an entry is debited to the customer account, generally account 41 (in France). With this criterion, you can configure that invoices issued in the name of “cooperative” type customers will not be placed on account 41, but on another customer account, 41xxx.

APE code: code used to classify company activities. Clicking on the magnifying glass displays the wizard.

Company number: you can enter the company's SIRET here (in France), or any other identification number in other countries. The company number will be printed on the invoices issued. In France, this is an obligatory statement.

VAT regime: this is the one that will be applied to the establishment of any document.

• Normal: this is the regime of the country where the company is established
• Exempt: purchase and sales invoices will be established with a zero VAT rate.
• Other rate: purchase and sales invoices will be established with a configurable VAT rate specific to the customer.
• Import/Export: for countries outside the company's country of establishment (non-EU countries if the company is located in the EU). Useful for VAT statistics.
• Suspension: for customers under VAT suspension regime.
• EU: countries in the Europe zone. Useful for VAT statistics.
• Other case: undefined cases.
• Exo supp: allows you to manage the case of customers subject to VAT but not to fancy taxes such as BIC (African taxation), FODEC (Tunisia), or CPS (French Polynesia).

Discount rate: if a discount rate is entered, it will be taken as the overall discount rate when any document is established.

Payment method is the usual one for the customer. If it is “Debit”, it will be necessary to enter a direct debit authorization date, and a RUM number.

Payment deadline is the usual payment deadline granted to the customer (for example: 30 days end of month), while Invoicing terms are their invoicing conditions (for example: 30% deposit, the balance on delivery).

Rate type is the rate group to which the customer may be attached.

This tab is displayed if the “Manage billing and delivery addresses” option is checked in the general settings.

Gestan can memorize additional addresses, including of course billing and delivery addresses, but also any other type of address: construction site address, building address, temporary address, vacation address, etc. It is possible to have several addresses per type, and declare an address as favorite for the type via the list context menu.

You can declare an unlimited number of contact types, via the generic labels screen or the combo context menu. A contact can only belong to one gender, unlike categories.

You can declare up to 20 additional categories of contact, for example “VIP”, “Owns a dog”, or “Members of the bowling club”.

This tab is displayed if additional fields contacts have been declared in the general configuration.

In addition to the data natively managed by Gestan, you can decide to manage additional information such as “Preferred color” (text), “Monthly income” (numeric), “date of obtaining exam” (date), “ Marital status” (combo), “Up to date with contributions” (boolean). These zones are declared via the additional fields configuration screen.

You can describe your contacts according to the categories to which they belong: you can define up to 20.

Access: Tools → Administration → Repository → Contact categories

Here, these are the preferences of the contacts in terms of pets, each category not being exclusive of the others (unlike the types of contacts, or the kinds of contacts): a person can like dogs and rabbits dwarves, for example.

Access: Contacts → List of contacts → Contacts by categories

The screen presents the contacts and their membership in existing categories.

You can directly click in the table to update the category membership.

Gestan is provided with the list of postal codes of French municipalities. For other countries in the world, it is possible to load a suitable postal code file. To do this, use the right-click on the zip code list.

Gestan is provided with an international list of country codes, the country file including a telephone mask, which allows you to format the telephone numbers of contacts and companies according to the country of the address. For example, for French telephone numbers, declare a mask 99-99-99-99-99 in the France country file (You could also declare (33)999 999999 as a mask)

Attach documents to a contact by dragging and dropping from the explorer. The documents tab of the contact list displays the list of documents linked to the contact. The “+” button allows you to attach a new document to the contact. But you can also use drag and drop (or drag'n drop) from the file explorer to attach a set of documents to the contact at once. In this case, the documents are copied to the contact's directory and not deleted.

You can attach a shortcut to a directory as a document. This is a useful tip if you want to manage a directory of documents on a particular topic for a particular contact.

To export the contacts, you can use the right click on the contact list, then the “Export to Excel” menu. But for a more detailed data export, you can use the Print button in the contact list, then select “Contact Export” in the Print combo of the contact status print screen.

When creating a new contact, you can use the “magic wand” button to copy a clipboard, formatted with lines like FAMILY NAME: DUPONT. This corresponds to the following use case: you have a form on the internet, which sends you order or registration emails, formatted as follows:

Registration received from:
FIRST NAME: Marianne
FAMILY NAME: Couestou
COMPANY: Naturopharm
EMAIL: naturopharm@gmail.com
ADDRESS: 42 route du Val de Riou
CITY: Star Bridge
POSTAL CODE: 13360
PHONE: 0631529675
ORDER_NUMBER:12

Make a copy of the received email, use the magic wand, and the extractable areas of the clipboard (here, all except the first and last) will be pasted into the corresponding areas of the contact form. Ask your webmaster to optimize their forms in this way!

Other “Contacts” articles