Contacts Are Not a Rolodex: People, Companies and the Roles They Play
The same person can be a tenant in one case, a guarantor in another and a witness in a third. Your contact list should know that.
An address book stores people. A case system stores relationships. The difference sounds academic until you try to answer a simple question: "Which of our open matters involve this company?"
One contact, many roles
In Herarx a contact is a person or a company — a name, emails, phones, address, notes, custom fields, labels. That is the Rolodex part. What makes it useful is that the same contact can be attached to any number of cases, each time in a named role defined by the template: Tenant, Landlord, Contractor, Claimant, Witness, Supervisor.
Open the contact and you see every case they appear in and what they were in each one. Open the case and you see the people in their roles. Nothing is typed twice, and a change of phone number reaches every case at once.
Companies are containers
People often belong to something bigger — a letting agency, a law firm, a household, a research group. A company contact can hold people beneath it, and you can rename the concept to match your world: Settings → Preferences lets you call the container Company, Group, Family, Household or Agency. A property manager sees households; an HR team sees departments.
Starred emails and who gets what
A contact can have several email addresses. Star the ones that should receive case correspondence and Herarx sends to all of them — the tenant's personal address and the shared inbox they asked you to copy, for example. Unstarred addresses are kept on record without being written to.
Import, don't retype
Bring an existing list in through Add many — paste several at once or upload a CSV, map the columns, review, commit. Classifications (labels) let you segment afterwards: "Active tenant", "Former client", "Preferred contractor". Export back out to CSV or Excel whenever you need a list for something else.
The habit that pays
When you create a case, attach the people in their roles before you do anything else. It takes thirty seconds and it is what makes every later feature work: document generation fills in the tenant's name, e-sign knows who signs, polls know who votes, and the case's contact list is complete on the day someone else has to take it over.
