Contacts are persons who assist your agency in ways other than donating, volunteering or tutoring, and for whom the agency wants to maintain information, and can be companies or individuals. Contacts may also be enrolled in a workshop, and materials may be checked out to contacts, depending on your agency policy.
After signing in to LACES NexGen, go to More on the area menu and select Contact from the list to go to the Contact area. All records display by default.
Contact records on the grid may be filtered by using grid row filtering. This allows you to perform searches on specific columns without creating a search. For more information about searches, go to Search.
Shared contact views display at the top left of the contact grid on the view options dropdown list. The default view is Contact List, which displays columns on the grid that provide at-a-glance information about the contacts. The view may be changed by selecting a different view from the list. This view will be in effect until you change it, even if you leave the contact grid temporarily by clicking on a different area, and then return to the contact area. For more information about views in general, or creating new views, go to View Manager.
Contact Toolbar
The toolbar at the contact grid allows you to:
•Add a new contact
•Make a selection
•Export to CSV
•Open the Report Manager
To add a new contact record, click the + Add New Contact icon to display the contact intake form.
In addition to common fields entered for identification and contact information, there are three required fields on the contact intake form that must be entered before the record can be saved.
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*Intake Date
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Intake date must be entered in order to populate the first line of status history at the contact History tab/Status History panel.
Intake date does not need to be updated each year, since the intent of this field is to track when the contact record was first added.
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*Last Name |
Enter how you wish the contact’s last name to display on the grid and in the contact record for sorting and reporting purposes. Make sure to enter the contact last name – not the contact first name. Last names may contain hyphens and commas.
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*First Name |
Enter how you wish the contact’s first name to display on the grid and in the contact record for sorting and reporting purposes. Make sure to enter the contact first name – not the contact last name. Last names may contain hyphens and commas.
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Should I enter the non-required fields?
When entering a record, it is good practice to enter all information you have at the time of entry, whether the field is required or not, if you plan to track this data. This saves having to go back later and edit the record.
‘Overall Status’ is not required, but since a status history record is populated when you save the record, it is also good practice to enter this field at the time of entry. When ‘Overall Status’ is not entered, the first line of status history will display the status ‘No Value Entered.’
Potential Duplicate Message
When the person being added as a contact has another role in your agency, you will get the ‘Potential Duplicate’ message when the last and first name match an existing person. Click the message to verify if the person being added as a contact is a completely different person with the same name, or an existing person in your agency.
Open Contact Detail Record
Contact records may be opened by double-clicking on the grid row, or by clicking the details icon on the row.