Contacts are any person, family, staff, volunteer, organization, or company that you may pay money to, or receive money from. Some contacts could be both. For example, a volunteer who receives a reimbursement for purchased supplies, who also donates money to the organization. This person only needs to be listed in the contacts once. What is important is that you code revenue to revenue accounts and expenses to expense accounts in your journal.
 
While you may be tempted to use this as a complete directory for your organization, it’s not designed for this purpose. You should keep a directory elsewhere, such as a separate Google Sheet.
 
At the beginning of the year, you won’t know all the contacts you’ll have financial transactions with, and you don’t need to! New contacts can be added at any time as new donors or payees. To get started, you might have a list of your common donors to add, and your common payees, such as utility companies. Enter what you know, but don’t stress about it. Name is required, while all other columns are optional.
 
Contact Type is an informational field and does not impact anything else in the workbook or reports. It can be used to sort or filter your contacts. You can edit the contact type options by clicking the dropdown from any contact type cell and clicking the pencil icon at the bottom of the dropdown.