Adding contacts
Add a single contact by hand from the Contacts toolbar; the New contact sheet captures name, email, work, and location details, dedupes on email, and drops you into the new record.
Most contacts arrive on their own: people register for events, apply through Cadre, or submit forms. When you need to add one by hand, open Contacts and click New contact. A sheet slides in from the right with the fields below. To add many people at once, use the import button, the upload icon that sits next to New contact in the same toolbar.
What the form captures
The sheet has three sections. Every field is optional on its own, but the form needs at least one identifying field before it will save (see below).
- Identity: First name, Last name, and Email. The Email field carries the helper line "Dedupes against existing contacts on this account."
- Work: Company, Job title, and LinkedIn URL.
- Location: City and Country.
Click Create contact in the sheet header to save. The button reads Creating… while the contact is being written.
The minimum a contact needs
A contact must have at least one of Email, First name, or Last name. Submit with all three empty and the form refuses to save, showing "Add at least an email, first name, or last name so you can find this contact later."
Contacts you add this way are stamped with the source reach_manual, which is how Reach distinguishes hand-entered records from event registrations, form submissions, and API writes.
Plan limits
Contacts and companies share one stored-record allowance. On the Starter plan, once your workspace hits its cap, Create contact is refused with "You've reached your plan's stored-record limit. Upgrade to add more." Pro and Growth plans don't hit this wall; they accrue overage instead of being blocked.
How the email dedupe works
If you enter an Email that already belongs to a live contact on this account, Reach doesn't create a second record. It updates the existing contact instead. The match is case-insensitive, so jane@example.com and Jane@Example.com are treated as the same person.
On a match, every field you filled in overwrites the matching field on the existing contact. Fields you leave blank keep whatever the existing contact already held; a blank in the form never wipes an existing value. After saving, the sheet opens that existing contact, not a new one, so you land on the record that already held the email.
What happens after you save
Once the contact is created, Reach opens its detail sheet automatically so you keep your place in the list. From there you can add tags, add the contact to lists, set custom field values in the Details tab, and move it through a lifecycle stage.
Reach also checks the contact's email domain against your organizations. If the part after the @ matches a domain on one of your organizations, an inferred affiliation is attached to the contact so it shows up in that organization's people. This needs an email to match on; the Company field plays no part in it, and it runs in the background rather than something you trigger.
Updated