Contact list template: the fields worth having and the ones that rot

A contact list template is one of those small artefacts every business builds three times: once for suppliers, once for clients, once for the emergency list on the wall. The structure barely differs, and the reason all three decay is the same — nobody owns them, and half the fields were never checkable in the first place.

Start by naming what the list is for. A supplier list exists so somebody can place an order at short notice. An emergency list exists so somebody can be reached at 2am. A client list exists to be segmented and mailed. Those three purposes want different fields, and merging them produces a list that serves none.

Fields worth having

• Full name, and separately the company. Storing "Jane at Acme" in one cell is what makes sorting and merging impossible later.
• Role or what they are for — "orders", "invoices", "technical" — because the useful question is usually who to ask, not who you know.
• Primary phone and email, one each, in a consistent format. A field holding three numbers separated by slashes cannot be dialled or exported.
• A second contact at the same company, which is the single most valuable field on any supplier list.
• Address, only if you actually send things there.
• Category or tags — supplier, client, contractor, emergency — as a controlled list, not free text.
• Notes: account numbers, preferred contact method, the fact they do not work Fridays.
• Last verified date. This is the field that separates a list from a liability, and the one almost every template omits.

Every field you add is a field somebody must maintain. Ten well-kept fields beat twenty-five where half are blank and the rest are two years old — and a blank field is honest, while a stale one is a small trap for whoever relies on it.

Building it so it stays true

1. Pick one home for the list, and delete the other copies. Two contact lists means two wrong contact lists.
2. Use one row per person, not per company. People move, companies persist, and rows built around companies lose the person.
3. Standardise phone numbers with the country code from the start. Retrofitting this across four hundred rows is a bad afternoon.
4. Use a controlled list for category, so filtering works and nobody invents "Supplier " with a trailing space.
5. Name an owner for the list, and say so in the file. Unowned lists rot at a predictable rate.
6. Set a review cadence — quarterly for suppliers, annually for everything else — and stamp the last-verified date when checked.
7. Export a copy before any bulk edit. Contact lists are exactly the kind of file someone sorts one column of by accident.
8. Record consent for anyone you will market to, with the date and what they agreed to.

Spreadsheet or address book

A spreadsheet is the right starting point: it is fast, everyone can edit it, and a contact list template is genuinely a table. It stops being right at the point where several people need to edit at once, where you want the same contact to appear in two lists without being duplicated, or where you need a history of what changed. That is the moment to move to an address book proper — the data is the same, the guarantees are different.

Ettex Contacts is that step: contacts and companies as separate but linked things, tags and smart lists so a contact belongs to several groupings without being copied, import and CSV export so moving in from your spreadsheet and back out again is a non-event, and an activity feed so you can see what happened with a contact rather than guessing from a stale note. It is free, and includes two thousand contacts per seat. If you would rather stay in a sheet, Ettex Sheets imports XLSX with formulas intact and gives you dropdown validation for the category column; when contacts arrive from outside — a supplier form, a signup — Ettex Forms collects them timestamped in one inbox for a clean import.

The boundary: Ettex Contacts is an address book, not a marketing platform. There is no email sending or campaign tracking from it, no automatic enrichment that fills in a company from an email domain, no business-card scanning, and no two-way sync with your phone's contacts. Import, tag, search, export — deliberately simple.

How contact lists go wrong

• Name and company in one cell, which blocks every sort, filter and mail merge you will ever want.
• Multiple numbers in one field, so nothing can be dialled programmatically or exported cleanly.
• No owner, so nobody updates it and everybody assumes somebody else did.
• Copies emailed around, after which there is no list, only versions.
• No last-verified date, so a two-year-old number looks exactly like yesterday's.
• Personal mobile numbers of ex-employees kept indefinitely, which is a data-protection problem rather than a tidiness one.
• Marketing consent not recorded, discovered only when someone asks to be removed and you cannot show what they agreed to.

A contact list template is ten fields and one owner. Keep name and company apart, one number per field, a category you control, and a last-verified date — and review it before you need it rather than while you need it.