Contacts

Contacts are Valise’s way to keep track of people you work with. For example:

• Buyers of your works
• Consignees and sellers of your works
• Photographers who have documented your works
• Production companies or staff who’ve helped with projects
• Collaborators who you’ve worked with
• Writers who have covered your work in the press

Contacts let you reference the same person throughout your vault without duplicating their information. If you later need to change names or locations, you can update it in one place and it will be reflected across your vault.

Contacts also lay the groundwork for several future features we plan to build.

Fields

• Name: the name of this contact. This is what you’ll see when choosing from the list of contacts, so use whatever name will help you recognize them.
• Location: the location of this contact. We recommend capturing the city and country if you have it, since it can make it easier know where your works are in the world.
• Roles: roles determine where in Valise we’ll suggest this contact.
• Notes: plain text notes about this contact. Use this to capture contact information, a more detailed address, and more. This is limited to 2,000 characters.

Roles

Roles determine where in Valise we’ll suggest this contact. A contact can have any number of roles at once.

• Buyer: shown when recording the buyer of a work.
• Consignee: shown when creating consignments, or when recording the seller of a work.
• Collaborator: shown when recording artists on a work.
• Author: shown when recording who wrote a press entry.

Roles only affect where a contact is suggested. You can always search the full list of contacts from any picker, whatever roles a contact has.

Managing contacts

To view all the contacts in your vault, or edit any contact, go to the Contacts settings page. From here you’ll see an alphabetically sorted list of all your contacts. You can use the search bar to find a specific contact, create new contacts, or edit and delete existing contacts.

Referencing contacts

When recording a sale or consignment, you’ll be able to select from a number of contacts. You can choose from contacts you’ve already created from the Contacts settings page, or you can create a new contact on-the-fly.

To create a new contact while recording a sale or consignment, type the name of the contact you’d like to add, then select the “New contact: (name)” option from the list. This contact will automatically be added to your vault’s list.

After creating the content, you’ll also have a chance to tag the contact with a location, roles, or any other notes.

Planned improvements

Contacts are the first step towards several other features we plan on adding to Valise, such as:

• Showing a full list of your works that a given person has bought.
• Showing summaries of which buyers have bought the most works, and which sellers have sold the most.