Contacts — everyone you've worked with, in one place

Adding someone mid-conversation? The + Contact button on your dashboard's quick-action bar opens the same quick form — name, phone, email — without leaving the page.

Contacts is your customer list. Every past client, active job, and lead lives here — and clicking into one shows you everything tied to that person: all their projects, what you've billed and collected, a running activity timeline, and a copy of every email BidCraft sent them. Find it in the sidebar under Contacts.

It answers the questions you used to dig through your inbox for: "What did I send the Nutters?" "Have they signed yet?" "Which jobs have I done for this customer?"

How contacts get created

You don't have to build this list by hand — most of it fills itself in:

• Automatically from projects. When you save a project with a client email, BidCraft creates (or reuses) a contact for that email. Do three jobs for the same customer and they're one contact with three projects, not three duplicates.
• From your history. Past projects you created before Contacts existed were backfilled, so your existing customers are already here.
• Manually. Hit + Add contact any time — handy for a lead you haven't started a project for yet.

Contacts are matched by email (case-insensitive), so the same customer never splits into duplicates as long as the email matches.

The contacts list

The list shows everyone with an avatar, name, email, phone, city, and where they came from ("From project" / "Added manually"). Use the search box to filter by name, email, phone, or city, and the filter chips to narrow down:

• All — everyone (active)
• From projects — contacts created from a job
• Added manually — contacts you typed in yourself
• Archived — contacts you've set aside (see below)

Inside a contact

Click any contact to open their detail page. The header lets you Edit their info or Archive them, and there are four tabs:

Overview

Their contact details — email, phone, address, city/state/zip — plus a free-form Notes field. Use Notes for anything worth remembering: referral source, preferred contact time, planned future work. Hit Edit to change any of it.

If you and this client used the old portal messages, the Overview tab also shows Earlier portal messages. Portal messaging has been retired, so this is a read-only record of what was said. It doesn't show for clients you never messaged with.

Projects

Every project tied to this contact, with its status and total. New projects you create with their email show up here automatically. Click one to jump straight to the project.

Emails

A copy of every email BidCraft sent this customer — proposals, change orders, invoices, receipts, payment-related notices, and any one-off email you wrote from a project's Client page — each with the full body the customer actually received. Click one to read the exact email. This is the record for "what did we send them, and what did it say."

[!note] BidCraft started archiving full email bodies on June 8, 2026. Emails sent before that show a "Body not archived" tag — we can show you the subject and when it went out (reconstructed from your proposal and invoice history), but not the original body. Everything sent from June 8 forward shows the exact rendered email.

Activity

A timeline of everything that's happened with this customer across all their projects — proposal sent, viewed, signed; change orders; invoices sent, paid, refunded; shareable links generated. Color-coded dots make signed/paid (green), viewed/sent (blue/amber), and refunded (red) easy to scan, and most rows link straight to the thing that happened.

Archiving and restoring

Done with a contact but don't want to lose the history? Hit Archive on their detail page (or find them under the Archived filter). Archiving moves them out of your main list without deleting anything — their projects, emails, and activity all stay intact. Restore them any time from the archived view or the banner on their page.

How Contacts relates to the rest of BidCraft

• Projects still work exactly as before — Contacts just gives you the customer-level view across a person's projects, instead of project-by-project.
• The Emails and Activity tabs are powered by what you already do (sending proposals, collecting payments). You don't log anything manually; it accrues as you work.
• If you use HighLevel, your HighLevel contact sync is unaffected — BidCraft Contacts is your in-app record, independent of any CRM integration.