Understand a contact

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View of the 'understand a contact' page

A contact is the fundamental unit of the Unisoft CRM. It is the unique profile representing a person (or a company) known to your organization: a congregant, a donor, a board member, a vendor, a parent of a pupil, a passing visitor.

All other objects in your base — payments, pledges, subscriptions, tax receipts, form submissions, email sends — link to one and only one contact. That is what enables Unisoft to build the 360° view of a person.

What a contact contains

A contact profile gathers five families of information.

1. Identity

Field	Role
Name	Last name, stored in UPPERCASE
First name	Usual first name, with initial capital (David)
Hebrew first name	For Hazkara reminders and Jewish birthdays (דוד)
Gender	Male / Female / Not specified
Date of birth	Automatic calculation of Gregorian and Hebrew age
Description / Notes	Free field for your internal remarks

For a deceased contact, additional fields appear: date of death, Hebrew first names of parents, burial place. They automatically feed Hazkara reminders (annual commemorations).

2. Contact details

A contact can have multiple phones, multiple emails and multiple addresses. The system distinguishes:

• A primary contact detail per category: the primary phone, the primary email, the primary address. They are the ones displayed first and used by default for sends (SMS, email, mail).
• Secondary contact details, labeled by type (Home, Work, Business, Other).

Example — David Cohen, regular congregant:

• Primary phone: +33 6 12 34 56 70 (personal mobile)
• Secondary phone "Office": +33 1 42 00 00 00
• Primary email: david.cohen@exemple-unisoft.org
• Primary address: 12 rue de la Paix, 75002 Paris

For details, see Main information tab.

3. Links with other contacts

A contact can be linked to other contacts via family relationships (spouse, parent, child, sibling, etc.) entered in the Relations tab of their profile.

• It is from these relationships that Unisoft automatically infers a person's household — you do not need to create a "family" by hand.
• The links (HUSBAND, FATHER, CHILD, BROTHER…) are used to reconstruct the family tree and the household, to offer Hazkara reminders to the right relatives, to avoid duplicate mail in the same household.
• The legacy Families view (/app/contact/famille), which allowed manually grouping contacts under a common label, remains accessible for historical bases but is no longer the recommended mechanism. See Families.

4. Segmentation

You can label a contact with as many categories as needed. A category is a simple free-form text you create on the fly: Regular donors, Board members, Volunteers, Bereaved families, Talmud Torah pupils…

Categories are used to:

• Filter the catalog or advanced search.
• Target a message send (SMS / email campaign).
• Restrict access to certain contacts via permissions.

You can also define custom fields specific to your organization (for example: Member number, Arrival date in the community, Kashrut preference). See Secondary information tab.

5. Contact state

A contact has multiple states that modify its behavior in the base:

State	Effect
Favorite (star ⭐)	Featured in quick selection lists
New	Automatically marked at creation; the flag disappears after the first view
Deceased	Appears in the "Deceased" sub-list of the catalog; activates Hazkara management
Archived	Removed from active views without being deleted; remains viewable
Deleted (trash)	Soft delete: kept for audit, restorable from the trash

"Adult" contact vs "child" contact

When you add a child as a relation of a parent contact, Unisoft creates a distinct contact profile but simplified: no personal contact details (children normally have neither phone nor address), but a filiation towards their parents.

On a child's profile:

• The Phones, Emails, Addresses cards do not appear (inherited from parents).
• A Parents card appears at the top, with clickable links to the parents' profiles.
• Communications continue to be sent to the parents by default.

External identifiers and technical links

A profile can carry several identifiers useful for integration with other systems:

Identifier	Usage
National ID number (Teudat Zehout, etc.)	Unique field per contact, useful for organizations subject to an identification obligation
Google ID	Synchronization with Google Contacts
Apple ID	Synchronization with the Apple address book (CardDAV)
Gift Aid	For UK organizations: authorization for tax recovery by the state

How a contact links to other modules

The contact acts as a junction point between Unisoft modules:

Concretely, from a contact profile you access in one click:

• The list of their payments (automatically filtered on them).
• The list of their subscriptions (active recurring payments).
• The list of their pledges (commitments made, settled or not).
• The tree of their family.
• Their tax receipts already issued or to be generated.

★

One profile, one person — always

Avoid duplicates at all costs (two profiles for the same person). When you spot one, use the Merge function available in the profile's action menu to combine them without losing payment history or associated pledges.

Points of attention

⚠

Three classic pitfalls

• Don't confuse contact and family: David and Sarah Cohen are two contacts who form a household because they are spouses (relationship entered on both their profiles). For grouped tax receipts, it is the household that counts, but the contact remains the basic building block.
• Categories vs custom fields: a category is binary (the contact belongs to it or not). A custom field carries a value (text, number, date, yes/no). Don't use a category for what should be a field.
• Deletion: deletion is a soft delete — the contact goes to trash and remains restorable. This is deliberate to avoid disasters. Permanent deletion requires manual intervention in the trash.

Going further

• The catalog — how to list and filter
• The contact profile — the visual structure
• Main information tab — identity and contact details
• Secondary information tab — categories and custom fields