Full View: Contact Info and a Real Notes Log

Full View (reachable from the contact popover on any phone number) is the complete record of what TelBuddy knows about a given customer: their entire message history, their editable contact details, and a real, structured notes log rather than a single text box.

Editable contact info. Name, business/company name, and email are all editable directly from Full View, so a customer's record can be filled in and corrected over time as you learn more about them, not just at the moment they first text in.

Why notes are a log, not a field. A lot of simple systems store "notes" as one big text box that gets overwritten every time someone edits it, which means one careless edit or a moment of confusion can permanently erase everything a previous teammate wrote. TelBuddy's notes are structured as individual, dated entries instead: each note is its own card, attributed to whoever wrote it, with its own delete button. Deleting or editing one note never touches any of the others, so the history stays intact by default rather than by discipline.

Notes can carry a real attachment. Each note supports one attached file (a photo, a PDF, or a Word/Excel document) up to 15MB. That is enough for things like a signed form, a photo from a job site, or a screenshot of a related email, kept attached to the specific note it is relevant to rather than floating separately.

Deliberately generic fields, on purpose. Name, business, email, and freeform notes are not tailored to any one industry. The same structure works whether you are running a real estate office tracking a lead, an insurance agency tracking a policyholder, a restaurant tracking a regular customer, or a car lot tracking a prospective buyer. Nothing about the contact system assumes what kind of business is using it.

Features at a glance

• Complete message history alongside editable contact info (name, business, email)
• Notes stored as individual dated entries, not one overwritable field
• Each note has its own author attribution and its own delete button
• One file attachment per note (photo, PDF, or Word/Excel document), up to 15MB
• Attachments stay tied to the note they belong to
• Generic field structure that works across any industry

The append-only design, and why it matters

This is the single most important thing about the notes system, and it is easy to under-appreciate until the day it saves you.

In a single-text-box system, notes are a shared document that everyone can silently overwrite. All of these are one keystroke away:

• A teammate selects all and types over six months of history
• Two people edit at once and one save quietly wins
• Someone tidies up "old" notes that turn out to have mattered

None of those are possible here. Notes are individual records. Adding one cannot affect another. Deleting one requires clicking delete on that specific note, so removing history takes deliberate effort rather than being the accidental default.

The author attribution matters for the same reason. In a shared inbox several people talk to the same customer, and "who wrote this?" is exactly what you need when a note is ambiguous. It also means notes read as a conversation between colleagues over time, rather than an anonymous block of text nobody feels responsible for.

Attachments: what fits and what to use them for

Each note takes one file, up to 15MB. Supported types cover the things that actually come up:

• Images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP), for photos and screenshots
• PDF, for signed forms, quotes, and documents
• Word and Excel (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX), for anything sent as an office document
• Plain text (TXT)

Where this earns its place:

• A signed form or agreement, attached to the note recording that it was signed
• A photo from a job site, attached to the note describing the visit
• A screenshot of a related email, so the conversation and the email live together
• A quote or estimate, attached to the note where the price was agreed

The attachment belongs to that note, which is the whole point. A file attached to the note explaining it is far more useful in six months than the same file sitting in a folder somewhere.

If you need to attach more than one file to a single event, add more than one note. That is cheaper than trying to bundle them and keeps each file next to its own explanation.

Filling in contact details

A record exists as soon as a number appears in your inbox, but it starts as just a phone number. Filling in the fields is worth the few seconds:

Name is the one that pays off immediately. A shared inbox full of names is dramatically easier to scan than one full of phone numbers, and it prevents the small indignity of greeting a regular customer as a stranger.

Business matters most for B2B, where the person and the company are different things worth tracking, and where several people from one company might contact you.

Email is worth capturing when a conversation is likely to move channel later, so nobody has to ask for it twice.

None of it is required, and everything is editable at any time. Fill it in as you learn it rather than trying to complete a record up front.

Getting the most out of it

Write the note when it happens, not later. The contact popover exists specifically so this takes seconds from inside the conversation. A note written three days later is a summary; one written immediately is a record.

Write for the colleague who picks this up cold. The person reading it next may have no context at all. "Said yes to the Tuesday slot, wants the quote emailed first" is useful. "Sorted" is not.

Capture what the message thread cannot. Anything said on a phone call is the clearest example: it exists nowhere else in the system. Same for anything decided internally about that customer.

Do not delete unless it is wrong. The system defends history by design, so deleting should be reserved for genuine mistakes and things that should never have been recorded, rather than tidying.