Creating and Editing Contacts

When you add a new contact or edit a new one, the form is the same.  The guide below applies to both however when editing a contact you should keep an eye out for some specific cases that need to be handled carefully:

• If you change the contact type from Parents to anything else, you will lose the 2nd Person Contact information so make a note of it before hand.
• Guardians should always be setup as linked contacts.  
• The 1st Person Contact should always be the father when adding Parents.  The 2nd Person Contact should be the mother.  If you have a mother then add the father later, you will need to switch them around.  This is because iSAMS will assume 1st Person is father elsewhere in the system and will label them incorrectly otherwise.

Click on the Add Contact button or Edit Contact button next to an existing contact to begin.

Contact Type and Merge Information

First choose the correct Contact Type. This is the relationship of this contact to the pupil you are editing. Most commonly this is Mother, Father, Parents etc...

Next you need to select the correct tick boxes to tell iSAMS what type of contact you are adding and what information they should receive.  For more information on this, see Mail Options and Merge Types

• Contact Only - Tick this box if the contact should not be used for mail merges or any pupil coms.  See Non-Contact Parent Procedure for more information
• All Merges - If ticked this contact will be included in all email merges and correspondence for this pupil.  This is most common for parents.  When ticked, the correspondence and reports boxes have no effect and should be left un-ticked.
• Billing - Tick this box if the contact is the bill payer for this pupil.  Only one contact can be bill payer at a time.
• Correspondence - Tick this box if the contact should receive general correspondence but not anything else.
• Reports - Tick this box to allow the contact to view School reports for this pupil.
• Academic Reports, Private Contact, Contact can be shared with other parents and Copy Bill Recipients should all be left un-ticked.

If you change the billing contact you must notify accounts of the change so they can check their system

Setting the Contact Location and Student Home

Next you must set the contact location, this is the location of this contacts information, in most cases this should be set to home as this is the contacts home address.  For some parents we also hold their work addresses as a separate contact.

If this address is the students home address, make sure you tick the Student Home checkbox. Only one address can be the students home address at a time.

Contact Information and Address

Next you must fill out the rest of the information for the contact as accurately as possible.  Some fields of note:

• Parental Responsibility - Make sure this is set correctly
• For UK addresses make sure the country is set to United Kingdom.  A lot of UK addresses do not have the country set and it makes searching for UK pupils and contacts a lot harder.

Emergency Contact Information

The last box is the emergency contact information.  If this contact is to be an SOS contact, please put the names of the contact in this box NOT the contact information.  Just the names.

See SOS Contact Information for more details

Finishing Up

Please ignore the Billing Email Address and Custom Groups Tabs

Click Save Contact when done