All contacts are kept under the heading of People in the main interface.
Manual contact adding: Your contacts can be updated manually by entering one contact at a time by selecting Add contact while in the People menu. Upon doing this a drawer will come out from the right side of the page and you will have the ability to enter the name. This can be in whichever format you like, but we suggest maintaining a standard format such as First Last or First Middle Last name. You will then see an area to enter the phone number. This needs to be done in the international format using +254 - this format needs to be used throughout FrontlineSMS, or there could be issues with unidentified contacts. Next, you have the opportunity to enter the contact's email address, but this is not a mandatory field. Next you will see Balance - this is where you will keep track of all of your contact's incoming payments. The default is set to zero ksh, and if a contact sends M-Pesa to you, their balance will be automatically updated. This can also be done manually, for instance if a contact pays in cash as opposed to M-Pesa, you can manually set their balance to the appropriate level. This is also useful should another person pay on behalf of the contact. Note though, the balance only takes into account incoming payments. Outgoing disbursements or other payments to the contact are not reflected in the balance. Therefore, if your organization is only sending out payments, it is likely that all clients remain 0 balance.
Below balance, you will find a tab that says Add more information. Here you choose Create New, where you can decide if the new field is text or a date. For instance, date may be useful if you want to keep track of all contact's join dates into the system, this could also reflect their birthdays, or any other significant dates to your organization. If you choose to add a new text field this can be for anything such as Sacco group name, city or any other type of significant data. While adding more information to specific contacts, this new field will only be added to the individual contact which you are editing. If you would like to automatically add a custom field to every contact, please see MANAGE CUSTOM FIELDS.
Screenshot- Payment Contacts 1
You can add as many custom fields as you would like, but it's important to note that only information entirely necessary to a contact's payments and SMS management be kept here, as the more information stored on the system may lead to the system operating slower than usual. It may be useful to still maintain a database of clients in a CSV file or other system where you keep all client information.
You can choose to add a contact to a group, which is useful to manage groups of people for SMS bulk messages, or to manage different financial products, such as a loan or installment plan. In the contact edit view you're able to assign contacts to groups, but to create groups you'll need to do that under the main interface of contacts. See CREATING GROUPS.
Once you've added all the details necessary to a contact you will click the save button at the bottom of the page. Note: the system saves each change you make and clicking the save button is only necessary to exit the contact edit view.
To add an entire list of contacts please see IMPORT CONTACTS (https://frontlinecloud.zendesk.com/entries/24634062-Importing-Contacts) for instructions.
Note: it is also possible for contacts to self subscribe into the contact database by sending in a series of SMS. Please see SUBSCRIPTION THROUGH SMS (https://frontlinecloud.zendesk.com/entries/77984839-Subscriptions-through-SMS-).
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