Creating a Contact

Field Service Companion lets you create contacts in two ways: you can add them manually, or you can import them from your phone's address book.

Adding a Contact Manually

1. Tap the Contacts tab, then tap the ＋ button in the top-right corner. You can also tap the add-person button at the top right of the Dashboard — it's always there, so you can add someone from the moment the app opens.
2. The New Contact form opens. The first field is Name — or how you'll remember them: a real name works, and so does "man on Oak St" if a name is something the person hasn't shared yet.
3. Fill in any fields you have. All fields are optional — you can save a contact with just an address, just a phone number, or even just a note.
4. Tap the Save contact button at the bottom of the screen. It stays within reach even while the keyboard is up.

The form keeps the essentials up front — name, address, and phone — so you can capture someone in seconds at the door. Two shortcut chips sit under the name field:

• From contacts — Bring someone over from your phone's address book with their details pre-filled.
• Use my location — Fill the address from where you're standing. While the app is still getting a precise GPS reading, this chip is dimmed and says Waiting for GPS…; when the reading is accurate enough to trust, the chip lights up. If a precise reading can't be found, the app tells you rather than guessing at a wrong address. (Your location is looked up by your phone's own mapping service, the same way map addresses are — it is never sent to Field Service Companion. See Privacy and Your Data.)

More Details, When You Want Them

Everything else lives behind What did you talk about? — tap it to open the rest of the form:

• Status — RV, Studying, or Regular (a contact marked Regular shows a “Studying regularly” badge). RV is the default.
• Date you first met — Defaults to today; tap to choose a different day.
• What you discussed — The conversation that made you want to record them: the question they raised, anything that struck you.
• Literature placed — A tract, a brochure, or any publication you left with them.
• Email and Language — Tap email on the detail screen later to message directly; language is helpful in a multilingual territory.

The first-conversation details live directly on the contact, separate from the Visit Timeline. Every later conversation gets logged as a return visit (see Logging a Visit). This way, "the day we met" stays distinct from "every time we spoke afterward."

Tip: You don't have to open that section at all — the contact still saves cleanly without it. Just know that the first-conversation details can only be recorded when you create the contact, so if you want to keep them, add them before you tap Save.

Importing Contacts From Your Phone

If you already have return visits saved in your phone's address book, you can import them into Field Service Companion without retyping everything.

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Import from Contacts.
3. The app will ask for permission to access your device contacts. Choose to allow it. On an iPhone or iPad you may be offered a choice between Allow Full Access and Select Contacts… — either one works. If you tap Select Contacts…, pick the people you'd like to bring over, and only those will appear in the next step. On Android, tap Allow.
4. A list of your device contacts appears. (If you chose Select Contacts… on an iPhone or iPad, this list shows only the people you picked.) Tap each one you want to import. The selected count is shown at the top of the screen.
5. Tap Import N contacts at the bottom.

Tip: If you don't see the contacts you expected, you may have shared only a few of them with the app. To share more, open your device Settings, find Field Service Companion, tap Contacts, and adjust which ones the app can see. If the screen ever says access wasn't granted, the Open Settings button there takes you straight to the right place.

What Gets Imported

The following fields are brought over from your device contacts:

• Name (display name)
• Phone number (the first one, if more than one exists)
• Email address (the first one, if more than one exists)
• Postal address (street, city, state, postal code, country — joined into a single line)

All other fields — language, status, and the Date you first met — are left blank for you to fill in. You can edit any contact after importing.

Importing One Contact at a Time

If you select just one contact to import, the app drops you straight into the New Contact form with the name, phone, email, and address already filled in. You can then set the Date you first met (it defaults to today, but tap to backdate if you've known the person for a while), what you discussed, and any literature you placed — exactly the same way you would when adding a contact manually. Tap Save when you're done.

When you import several contacts at once, the form step is skipped and the records come in directly. You can edit any of them later to set the Date you first met.

Duplicate Detection

If an imported name matches an existing contact in the app, the app will show you a confirmation dialog naming the duplicates. You then choose:

• Cancel — Stop the import without changing anything.
• Import anyway — Bring all selected contacts in as new records, including the duplicates. (You can review and clean up afterward.)

There is no automatic "merge" — that would silently overwrite information on the existing contact, which is rarely what you want. If you'd prefer to merge, the simplest path is: import as new, copy across whatever's missing on the existing record by editing it, then delete the imported duplicate.

Privacy

Your device contacts are read on your phone only. No contact information from your address book is ever sent to any server. The app accesses your address book only during the import process and does not keep a copy of it.

Need More Help?

If you have difficulty creating or importing contacts, a friend who is familiar with Field Service Companion may be able to help you. You can also contact us at support@returnvisits.org.