A contact is the person or client you're collecting documents from. Contacts don't need a docEvault account — they access their requests through a link, not a login.
Adding one
Go to Contacts and add a new contact with a name, email, and optionally a phone number.
Add a phone number only if the contact has agreed to receive text messages. Consent is required before docEvault will text them — see SMS reminders and consent for what counts as consent and how to record it.
The contact detail page
Open a contact to see every request you've sent them, their message history, and their status at a glance. This is usually the fastest way to answer "where did we land with this person" without digging through email.
Archiving
Contacts you no longer work with can be archived instead of deleted. Archiving keeps their document history intact while getting them out of your active list, which matters if you have retention obligations or might need the file again later.
A note on shared phone numbers
The same phone number can legitimately belong to more than one contact — a shared office line, a spouse, a vendor who works with several of your clients. docEvault allows this rather than forcing phone numbers to be unique.
One consequence worth knowing: if someone replies STOP to a text, the opt-out applies to that phone number. If that number is on more than one contact record, all of them stop receiving texts.