I am a circus artist and tour the country performing solo circus shows. As such, I typically only have one contact at each organization whether that be a librarian, entertainment director, or theater manager. I am brand new to Honeybook, so I just finished importing my contact list from an SCV file.
I wanted to go back in and manually add each organization to the contact list, but Honeybook won’t allow me to create a new organization in the contact edit screen. It only gives me a dropdown menu with the sample organizations in it.
The only way to add a new organization is when I create a new contact. But that means I’d have to start over, remove the imported contacts and manually create each contact from scratch. Thats so many hours of work.
I considered creating a custom field to track organizations, but I was told by the AI help bot that custom fields can’t be used in contact forms. This kind of defeats the purpose of using them. So, is there a workaround? Or do I really need to delete all my contacts and create each on manually? Please advise. Thanks!
Best answer by Andrew Silver
Hi @Alicia Bauer,
Thanks for the thorough response. I was about to follow your instructions and do the workaround when I figured out another solution. I don’t know if this was a recent update they made, but I found a way to add a new organization to an existing contact without needing to create a new contact first.
When viewing a contact, you can click on the Edit button next to “Contact info”. This is where you’d usually go to add new information or assign an already existing organization. When clicking on “Organization”, the drop down menu will show all existing organizations to choose from. However, if you just click on the entry field and begin typing a new organization name, an option will pop up in blue text that that says “+ Add (whatever you typed)”. Clicking this will create a new organization and assign it to this contact.
I just went through and added a bunch of new organizations and assigned them to all the contacts I just imported.
I hope this can help anyone else who is struggling with this issue during an initial import.
@Andrew Silver - You’re not doing anything wrong this is a limitation in how HoneyBook currently handles Organizations.
At the moment, you can’t create a new organization from within an existing contact’s edit screen. Organizations can only be created:
when creating a new contact, or
when an organization already exists and can be selected from the dropdown
That’s why you’re seeing only the sample organizations after importing.
The good news: you do not need to delete and recreate all your contacts.
Best workaround:
Pick one existing contact for each organization
Edit that contact and temporarily change something minor (like adding a note)
Create the organization by adding it through a new contact once
Once the organization exists, you’ll then be able to assign it to your already-imported contacts via the dropdown
It’s clunky, but once an organization exists in your account, you can reuse it.
You’re also correct about custom fields, they currently can’t be used in contact forms, which limits their usefulness for intake and organization tracking.
If managing organizations is core to your workflow (and it sounds like it is), I’d strongly recommend submitting this as a Feature Request.
Thanks for the thorough response. I was about to follow your instructions and do the workaround when I figured out another solution. I don’t know if this was a recent update they made, but I found a way to add a new organization to an existing contact without needing to create a new contact first.
When viewing a contact, you can click on the Edit button next to “Contact info”. This is where you’d usually go to add new information or assign an already existing organization. When clicking on “Organization”, the drop down menu will show all existing organizations to choose from. However, if you just click on the entry field and begin typing a new organization name, an option will pop up in blue text that that says “+ Add (whatever you typed)”. Clicking this will create a new organization and assign it to this contact.
I just went through and added a bunch of new organizations and assigned them to all the contacts I just imported.
I hope this can help anyone else who is struggling with this issue during an initial import.
