How to Manage Contacts

Contacts is where you store every person and business you work with: retail customers, monument companies, cemeteries, funeral homes, plot owners, and other partners. Find it in the sidebar, between Orders and Settings.

The Contacts page uses a master/detail layout: pick a contact from the list on the left and its full details open on the right. On mobile, tap a contact to open its full-screen detail view. There, tap the phone number or the email to copy it: its label reads Copied for a moment.

Already keep your customers in a spreadsheet or another system? The small (i) next to the Contacts title reads "Already have a list? Import it from a spreadsheet in Settings > Import." Its link opens the contacts import, which brings them all over in one go. See How to Import Your Data from a Spreadsheet.

Contact categories

Every contact has a Category. There are six, and the category decides two things: whether quotes for that contact use your wholesale prices, and whether the contact can belong to more than one office.

• Retail is the default. These are the families buying a monument for their own use.

• Monument Company (shown as Monument Co on badges and filter chips) is for other monument dealers you sell to or work with.

• Cemetery is for cemetery offices you coordinate with.

• Funeral Home is for funeral homes that refer customers to you.

• Plot Owner is the person who holds the deed to the plot. Record a plot owner on an order and they are saved here as a reusable contact.

• Other Business Type (shown as Other) is for any other business contact that does not fit the categories above.

Only three of the six are wholesale: Monument Company, Cemetery and Funeral Home. Orders from those three show a blue Wholesale label next to the order number and use your wholesale prices. Retail, Plot Owner and Other Business Type are all treated as retail and show a gray Retail label.

The gotcha: Plot Owner and Other Business Type read like business categories, so it is easy to assume they are wholesale. They are not. If you need wholesale pricing for a partner, put them in Monument Company, Cemetery or Funeral Home.

If you have Enable wholesale pricing turned on in Settings → Inventory, quotes for the three wholesale categories use your wholesale prices automatically. How Inventory Works

There is one place where the split is different. The multi-office Locations picker follows a wider rule: every category except Retail gets the multi-select, so a Plot Owner or an Other Business Type contact can span offices even though they are priced as retail. See Locations for multi-office contacts below.

How to add a contact

Click the round + button (New contact) at the top right of the contacts list. A new contact screen opens with the save and cancel controls in its top bar. Fill in:

• Full name: type the whole name in the single field under the avatar. The first word becomes the first name and everything after it becomes the last name. A contact in a business category (any category except Retail and Plot Owner) keeps the whole name together as one business name instead, so Smith Family Trust is never split.

• Category: click the Set category pill under the name and pick one of the six.

• Phone, Email and Address. Phone numbers keep every digit you give them. MonuDesk saves a phone in international form, such as +14123438555, and shows it the way your company's market writes it: (412) 343-8555 for a US company, 030 901820 for a German one. A number pasted out of an email or a spreadsheet is cleaned up the same way. A number from another country, typed with its + country code, keeps that code. A number with an extension such as 412-343-8555 x1234 is stored exactly as you typed it.

• Location or Locations: only appears when your company has more than one office. Retail contacts get a single-office Location picker; every other category gets a Locations multi-select.

• Lead source: how the customer first found your shop. It offers the same choices as the Lead source pill on New Quote → Client Info. Older contacts show the lead source of their first order that has one.

• Notes: anything your team should know about this contact. Notes are internal and never shown to the customer.

Save with the round check button (Save new contact) at the top right. It stays grayed out until you have typed a name (a name is the only required field), so if the check button will not light up, that is why. The X button cancels; if you have typed anything you are asked Discard changes? with Keep editing and Discard.

Once saved, the contact shows its Lead source as its own row. Edit the contact to change it, or pick Not recorded to clear it and hide the row. When a contact has no lead source yet, a new order with a lead source fills it in; an order never overwrites a lead source the contact already has.

If the contact already exists (multi-office)

On accounts with more than one office, MonuDesk checks for a likely match before it saves. If it finds one, a Contact already exists dialog opens: "A contact with this name and phone or email already exists. Use the existing record, or create a new one for this location." The check finds the phone whether the saved contact has it as (412) 343-8555 or as +14123438555.

• Each match is listed as a tappable card showing the name, phone and email, and the office that record belongs to. Tap a card to open that contact instead of creating a second one.

• Create new for this location saves your new record anyway. Use this on purpose when the same buyer works with two of your branches and you want separate records per office.

• Cancel takes you back to the form with everything you typed still there.

Single-office companies never see this prompt; the save goes straight through.

Searching and filtering

The search bar at the top reads "Search name, phone, email, decedent". It matches the contact's name, business name, email and phone, and the decedent names on the orders linked to that contact. Type a deceased person's name to find whoever ordered their memorial. When you type more than one word, each word has to start a word in the name, so jo smi finds John Smith. A phone number is found however it was typed: (239) 049 finds a number saved as +12390490234. This works on a computer and on a phone.

The filter chips below the search bar narrow the list by category. They read All, Retail, Monument Co, Cemetery, Funeral Home, Plot Owner and Other, in that order. The chip row scrolls sideways on a narrow screen, so swipe it if you cannot see Plot Owner or Other.

Connected orders

Open a contact and find the Orders section to see every order where this contact is the customer. Each order row shows:

• The order number with the full name(s) of the deceased on the line beneath it, so you can tell orders apart at a glance.

• A stage badge showing where the order sits in your pipeline.

• A payments summary reading "{n} payment(s) · ${total} received". This counts only the payments you have marked as received.

• Clickable file chips. Click one to open that document in a new tab.

Payments and files are shown nested under each order, and only when that order actually has some. An order with neither shows just the top row. Click any order row to open the full order in place, so closing it brings you back to the contact instead of the Orders board. If a contact has no orders yet, you will see "No orders linked to this contact yet."

Locations for multi-office contacts

If your company has more than one office, you can control which locations a contact belongs to. This whole feature is hidden for single-office companies. You will not see any location field.

• Every category except Retail (Monument Company, Cemetery, Funeral Home, Plot Owner and Other Business Type) gets a Locations multi-select. Tick the specific offices the contact works with, or tick Select all to make the contact visible in every office, including ones you add later. The field then reads All locations.

• Retail contacts use a single-office Location picker. Pick the one location the contact belongs to.

You can set the location when you add a contact, and change it any time by editing the contact. Location shows in the contact's detail view, not as a per-row label in the list.

Contacts are scoped to the offices you can access. A contact appears in your list only if it is set to all locations, its home office is one you can access, or it has an explicit membership in one of your offices. If you try to open or save a contact outside your accessible offices, you will see an "Access denied" message. Existing contacts keep their original office until you edit them to use multiple locations.

Editing or changing a contact's category

Open any contact to change any field, including the Category. This is useful when an order was created under the wrong category and is being priced retail when it should be wholesale, or the other way round.

You can also do this straight from the Order Management board. Click the Retail or Wholesale label next to an order number on a card and the Edit Contact form opens, filled in with that contact's saved details, Category included. Change it there and save: the order's label updates and the contact's category is updated everywhere else it appears. See The Create New Contact and Edit Contact form below.

Adding a contact who is already in MonuDesk as an additional contact on an order does not change their category. A Category is global to the contact, so a funeral home you add as a second contact on a retail order stays a Funeral Home. Only a brand-new contact you type straight into the order takes that order's category.

The Create New Contact and Edit Contact form

Some places in MonuDesk open a contact in a dialog instead of on the Contacts page. It is headed Create New Contact for a new record and Edit Contact for one that already exists. You reach it by clicking the Retail or Wholesale label on an order card, and when you create a contact while composing a message in Conversations.

The dialog holds a Basic Information card with Full Name, Category, Email, Phone and Address, then an Internal Notes box, with Cancel and Save Contact at the bottom. Save Contact stays grayed out until the contact has both a name and a category.

Address suggests addresses as you type, for the United States and Canada. Pick a suggestion and the field fills with the full formatted address, adding the ZIP or postal code if it was missing. Type an address and ignore the suggestions and it is saved exactly as you typed it.

Phone works the same way as on the Contacts page. It keeps every digit, is saved in international form and is shown the way your company's market writes it, such as (412) 343-8555. A number with an extension such as 412-343-8555 x1234 is stored exactly as typed.

Opening Edit Contact from an order card fills every field with what is already on the contact, and the company name held against that contact is kept when you save.

How categories affect the Order Board

Orders from a Retail, Plot Owner or Other Business Type contact show a gray Retail label next to the order number.

Orders from a Monument Company, Cemetery or Funeral Home contact show a blue Wholesale label.

You can also narrow the Order Management board using the Filters control on the board. The available filters are stage, date, task, and customer type. The customer type filter uses the same Retail/Wholesale split, so filtering for Wholesale brings up only orders from those three categories. Combined with Smart Search this makes it easy to find, for example, all wholesale orders for a specific cemetery or all wholesale service orders.

Related articles:

• How to Fill In Client Information

• Understanding the Order Board