Tagging contacts and filtering your address book

A venue's address book is rarely a flat list. The internal stage manager, the external AV vendor, the venue's banqueting coordinator, the client's day-of organiser, the photographer's assistant, the two florists you trust for big rooms, the kitchen team at the hotel you book most often.

They all belong on the Contacts list, but they are not interchangeable, and scrolling a hundred-row list to find "the AV guys we used at the Hilton" is wasted time. Contact tags solve that.

This article covers how tags work, how to filter the contacts list by tag, and the new Events tab on each contact that pulls up the full booking history for that person in one place.

Adding a tag to a contact

Open any contact from the Contacts list and you'll see a Tags field on the edit form. Type a word (AV, Photo, Venue, Catering, Florist, In-house, External) and press Enter to commit the tag as a chip. Add as many tags as the contact warrants; there's no limit, and tags are free-text so you can invent the taxonomy that fits your business.

Tags are case-insensitive on match (typing "av" and "AV" produce the same chip) but display in the form you originally entered. Pick a convention and stick to it, the autocomplete will then suggest your existing tags as you type so the list stays consistent across new contacts.

There's no central admin page for tags. They live on each contact, and the list of available tags is simply "every tag you've ever typed on any contact". To rename a tag across the board, edit each contact that uses it; to retire a tag, simply stop applying it.

Filtering the contacts list by tag

On the Contacts list page, a row of tag chips sits above the search box. Click a chip to filter the list to contacts carrying that tag. Click a second chip to broaden the filter to "contacts carrying either tag" (OR semantics). Click a chip a second time to remove it from the filter.

The chips and the search box compose: type a name in the search while a tag filter is on, and the list narrows to contacts that match both the search and the tag. The filter survives the live keystroke search and the pagination, so you can drill into a tagged subset confidently.

Stale tags are pruned automatically. If you remove the last contact carrying a tag, that tag's chip disappears from the filter row on its own. There's nothing to clean up.

Tags are also picked up by the contact autocomplete on the event-edit form: typing "AV" in the contact picker brings up your AV-tagged contacts first. Useful when you're staffing a new event and want to short-list by role without remembering names.

Worth-tagging-for patterns

A few conventions that have worked well for venues we've watched:

• Function. AV, Photo, Video, Catering, Florist, Stylist, Security, Stage Manager, Stage Hand. The basic "what they do" tag.
• Inside vs outside the business. In-house, Freelance, External, Sub-contractor. Useful when half your crew are payroll and half are 1099 / ABN: surfaces who needs a contract, who needs an invoice.
• Trust tier. Trusted, New, Probation. For larger venues that hand-pick crew per event, this lets you filter to the people you know will deliver.
• Venue affiliation. Hilton Sydney, Plaza Hotel, Conference Centre. Useful when a venue's own staff (their banqueting team, their AV team) are on the contact list alongside your suppliers and you need to know which crew "belong" to which venue.
• Language or specialty. Spanish, AUSLAN, Hebrew, GF-certified. For events with specific needs where you want to be able to pull up a short-list fast.

Tags layer cleanly; one contact can hold all of these at once. The filter row uses OR semantics so combining tags on the filter widens the result, while combining a tag with the search box narrows it.

The Events tab on each contact

Each contact's edit form has an Events tab next to Details. The badge next to the tab name shows the total event count for that contact, so you can see at a glance how often you've booked them without opening the tab.

Open the tab to see every event the contact has appeared on. Each row carries the event name, the date, the contact's role on that event (job title from the timeline item or their share-link record), and an Edit run of show button that jumps straight into that event's planner.

The history includes both timeline-item assignments and share-link issuances, current and revoked. That means even if a contact wasn't assigned a specific timeline item but did get the live link for the event, they're in the history. This matches how venues actually use the data: "we worked with this person on this event" is the question, not "were they assigned a specific row on the run sheet".

The list is sorted by event date, newest first. Past events sit below upcoming events. For contacts you've worked with on hundreds of events the list pages on its own, so a long history doesn't slow the form down.

Practical workflows

• A regular vendor calls and asks "what's the next event we're on together?" Open their contact, switch to the Events tab, the upcoming events sit right at the top. Read off the date and the venue and you're done.
• A vendor stops working with you. Filter the Contacts list to a relevant tag (say Florist), find them, open the Events tab to see whether any upcoming events have them assigned, and reassign accordingly. The history view doubles as a quick "do I need to do anything about this departure" check.
• You're building a new event for a familiar venue. On the contact picker for the timeline item, type the venue's tag (Hilton Sydney) and the venue's regular crew float to the top of the autocomplete. Pick the banqueting coordinator and the duty manager in two clicks instead of remembering their names.
• A client asks "how often have we used this photographer?" Open the photographer's contact, glance at the badge on the Events tab. The count is your answer.

A small note on contact privacy

Tags are private to your account. A contact never sees the tags you've applied to them, and tags are not shared between users on a multi-user account if you have one. The taxonomy you build up is your own working notes.

Crew uploads, request responses, and share-link tokens are unaffected by tag changes; tags are pure metadata for your benefit.