Contacts

Contacts

Contacts are the people and organisations your inventory touches — the folks you lend to and borrow from. They tie loans and bookings together.

Where to find it: the Contacts screen (in the menu, when the module is enabled).

What a contact is for

A contact is a lightweight record of a person or organisation. Once you have one, it becomes the who behind several features:

• Loans — check items out to a contact and track what they have.
• Bookings — reserve items for a contact over a date range.

The Contacts screen shows what each person currently holds on loan, so you can see at a glance who has what. The overdue badge beside the On loan heading counts every late loan you have, however many there are, rather than only the ones the list has room for. If there are more loans than the list can show at once, it shows the ones due soonest and says how many are left over; Export beside the heading still saves the lot.

If you build up a lot of contacts, the list splits into pages using the same pagination control as the rest of the app — turn it on with Paginate list (or Settings → Inventory → Lists), and every contact stays reachable however many you have. With it off, the list shows as many as it can read at once and tells you how many are left over.

ℹ️ Note Purchasing doesn't draw on contacts. Purchase orders and supplier parts record a supplier's name directly, so adding a supplier as a contact won't make it appear in those screens.

💡 Tip You don't have to create contacts up front. When you check an item out to someone new, Gubbins can create the contact on the spot — so the list builds itself as you go. Names are matched ignoring case, in any language, so typing café ltd reaches the Café Ltd you already have rather than filing a second record beside it — and the same name in different capitalisation is refused if you add it from the Contacts screen.

ℹ️ Note Contacts are ordinary data on your device. Keep only what you need, and remember the repository and any backups are yours alone — Gubbins never shares them. See Privacy & security.

💡 Tip Each of the screen's two lists exports on its own: Export beside On loan saves who has what and when it's due, and Export beside Contacts saves the address book with each person's open-loan count. Both cover the whole list, not just the page on screen. See Export & import.

Related pages

• Loans — lending items to a contact.
• Export & import — saving contacts or loans to a file.
• Bookings — reserving items for a contact.