Tagging and filtering contacts

Once you are past your first hundred contacts, scrolling is not a plan. Tags are free-text labels you put on a person so you can pull up "the electricians", "everyone at the Northgate site" or "this season's casuals" in one click, on the Contacts list and on a portal.

There is no setup. Type a word on a contact and it becomes a tag.

Putting tags on a contact

Open any contact from Contacts and find the Tags field on the Details tab. Type a word and press Enter (or type a comma) to add it as a chip, then save the contact. The × on a chip removes it.

• Up to 20 tags per contact, each up to 50 characters.
• Free text. Invent whatever taxonomy fits your business.
• Not case sensitive. "HR" and "hr" are the same tag; the filter chips show the first spelling they find.

As you type, the field suggests tags you have used before, which is what keeps a list from drifting into Electrician, electrician and Electricians. New tags join the suggestion list on the next page load.

There is no central tag admin screen. The available tags are every tag on any of your contacts. To rename one everywhere, edit each contact using it. To retire one, stop applying it: when the last contact carrying a tag loses it, the chip disappears from the filter rows by itself.

Filtering the Contacts list

Under the search box is a Filter by tag row with a chip for each tag you use. Click one to narrow the list. Click it again to remove it. Clear drops them all.

Two rules make this behave the way you want, and they run in opposite directions:

• Several chips widen the result. Tags are OR: a contact passes if it carries any of the selected tags. Electrician plus Plumber gives you both trades, not the people who are somehow both.
• The search box narrows it. Search and tags combine, so "smith" with Electrician active gives you electricians named Smith. Search matches company, first name, last name, email and mobile, and runs as you type.

The list pages at 25, and the filter survives paging, so you can drill into a tagged subset without losing it. The filter also lives in the URL, which means a filtered view is bookmarkable. If "everyone at Northgate who is a subcontractor" is a view you open weekly, bookmark it once.

Filtering on a portal

This is where tagging pays for itself, and it is the part people miss. A portal's people panel has two tag filters, both OR like the Contacts list.

Adding people. The Add from contacts box has a Filter by tag chip row above it. Click Electrician and the type-ahead only offers electricians. Adding fifteen people of one kind to a new portal becomes fifteen picks off a short list instead of fifteen searches through your whole address book. The filter stays on between picks, so you set it once.

Only tags carried by someone not already on the portal appear as chips there, so every chip is guaranteed to return somebody.

The people already on it. The list of people on the portal has its own separate chip row. Use it to answer "which of the electricians on this portal still have not sent their license" without reading the whole list. The two filters are independent: setting one does not touch the other.

A tagging convention that holds up

Tags layer, so one person can carry several. A few patterns that survive contact with reality:

• What they do. Electrician, Plumber, Rigger, Cleaner, Driver. The workhorse tag, and the one you will filter on most.
• Where they work. Northgate, Riverside, Depot 2. Useful the moment you run more than one site.
• How they are engaged. Employee, Subcontractor, Casual, Agency. This is usually the one that decides which pack of documents somebody needs.
• Intake batch. 2026 intake, Summer casuals. Handy for a group you will want to find again as a group, months later.

Resist the urge to tag things the software already tracks. Whether somebody has finished their onboarding, whether a document is expiring, whether an upload needs review: all of that is on Requests, kept current automatically, and a hand-maintained "Compliant" tag goes stale within a week.

Where else tags show up

The Contacts report filters by tags (matching any), search and minimum rating, and Download CSV exports the result. The People report can group a portal's list by tag.

Privacy

Tags are yours. The person never sees the tags you have applied to them, and they appear nowhere on their portal page or in any email.

They are account-wide rather than personal, so anyone you have shared the account with sees and can edit the same tags. Treat the taxonomy as a shared working vocabulary, not private notes.

Getting help

If something here does not match your screen, open a ticket or email [email protected].