Every name in its place: the new contact management

Whoever manages property mostly manages relationships: owners, prospects, tradespeople, property managers, notaries. Until now these names lived scattered — as of today they have a home. The estate agent software has been given full contact management, and because good tools begin unobtrusively, one more detail with it, one that everybody sees and nobody notices as long as it is missing: the favicon in the browser tab.

One address book, two points of view

The new contacts module shows its world from two directions. On the left in the navigator sits the companies section: each with the complete legal details a proper invoice needs — legal form, VAT ID, tax number, register court, management, bank details. Below it the contacts section: people with everything daily business demands — phone, mobile, e-mail, birthday, addresses by category (post, invoice, delivery), bank details and a photo.

The fine part is the link between them: a person can belong to any number of companies, with a position of their own per company. The tax adviser who looks after three of your owner associations is recorded exactly once — and is still found everywhere she belongs.

The tree with roots

Contacts can be ordered into groups, and groups may have subgroups — a tree of the kind you know from good filing systems. A contact may sit in several groups at once. And the tree thinks along: whoever picks the group “owners” also sees the contacts of every subgroup below it; whoever clicks the trunk at the top sees them all. That keeps the big list always one click away.

Customer numbers nobody can count

Every contact and every company automatically receives a customer number when created. It starts with the date and ends in random characters — deliberately not sequential: a sequential number tells every recipient which customer in line they are and how fast the business is growing. Our numbers tell nothing. Changing them, by the way, is reserved for administrators — and really so: the rule does not only apply on screen, the server itself rejects any other attempt.

From the address book onto the website

Contact management does not end at the desk: a new website element, “contacts”, places a chosen group on your estate agent website as a team section — as a tile grid or a list, with photos, positions and contact details. The estate agent office maintains its team once in the address book, the website follows. Strictly separated, of course: each website only sees the group it was given.

Two finds from the workshop

Two mistakes along the way are worth telling.

The first: whoever gave a contact a different group saw the change only after a reload. The cause sat deep — the assignment between contact and group lives in a table so inconspicuous that our change broadcast simply overlooked it: it reported every changed row to all workplaces, but held these rows to be nobody's business. Now it reports both ends for links of this kind on principle — not only for contacts and groups, but for every future link of that shape. A bug found once, settled for good.

The second: the contact photo had vanished after saving — while it had been there the whole time. The display element only adopts an image when it changes, not when it is already present at opening. An old acquaintance, as it turned out: the same dialog building block had long had a solution elsewhere, neatly documented. Sometimes the best repair is a look into your own archive.

The smallest sign outside

And then there was the browser tab. Among twenty open tabs a website without its own icon is invisible — which is why from now on you pick a favicon straight from your media library in the website settings. The website delivers it on every page, including to the old-fashioned devices that simply ask for it blindly. A small feature, a large difference in recognition.

The balance

The contacts module arrived as a complete package: data model, server, desktop client and website element, plus the favicon — over 3,500 tests green, zero findings in the code analysis, test coverage held. And it is more than an address book: it is the foundation on which e-mail and invoicing will be built next. Every name in its place — so that everything to come knows who it is addressing.