Turn a Pile of Business Cards into Contacts and Excel

Trade fairs, client visits and conferences all end the same way: a pocket full of business cards and no time to type them in. A week later the cards are in a drawer, the follow-up emails were never sent, and nobody remembers which distributor wanted the price list.

Business cards in Quantum-NoteMaster turn that pile into contacts while the meeting is still fresh. You photograph the cards, the details are read for you, and every person is ready to call, message on WhatsApp, save to your phone or hand to your sales team as a spreadsheet.

Open Expenses and tap Business cards. Under "1. Photograph the card", tap Take photo for one card. If the back has details too, such as a second office or a WhatsApp number, tap "+ Add the back too" and photograph that side as well. Choose the trip you met them on if you like, then tap Read cards.

Got a pile? Lay the cards side by side on a table so each one can be seen, and take a single photo. Every card in the photo becomes its own contact, up to ten per photo. For a bigger pile, use Photograph them one by one, which opens the camera for each card in turn, or Pick photos from your gallery if you took the pictures earlier.

For each card, the name, job title, company, phone numbers, WhatsApp number, email, website and address are filled in. Phone numbers are stored in international form, so a Lagos mobile written as 0803 000 1111 becomes +234 803 000 1111 and works from anywhere. Cards in English, French and Arabic are all read.

Each card then opens for you to check against the photo, with the card shown beside the form. Anything the reader was unsure about is marked "Please check", so a smudged number never slips through unnoticed. Add a note while you remember it, for example "Wants the Q4 price list by Friday", and save. If you already have someone with the same phone number or email, you are offered to merge the two instead of keeping a duplicate.

Every contact has WhatsApp, Call and Email buttons, so you can follow up straight from the list. To keep someone in your phone’s address book, tap Save to my phone. On an iPhone, the contact opens and you tap Create New Contact. On Android, the contact card downloads: tap Open, choose Contacts, then Save.

If you have connected our Telegram bot, Send to Telegram is the quickest way on Android. The bot sends you the person as a contact card in Telegram; tap it, then Add to contacts. You can also add cards from Telegram itself: send a photo of a card with the caption "card" and it is saved to your business cards on your most recent open trip.

Tap Download Excel (or CSV) for one row per person: name, title, company, phone numbers, WhatsApp, email, website, address, country, the trip, the date you met and your notes. Choose a trip first to download only the people you met on it, which is ideal for handing a fair’s leads to the sales team the next morning.

Trip reports pick them up too. When a trip has contacts, its Excel report gets a Contacts sheet beside the expenses, so finance sees the costs of the visit and sales sees who it was with, in the same file.

Business cards are on the Starter plan and above. Each card uses one AI reading from the same monthly allowance as receipts, and the front and back of one card count as one. Typing a contact in by hand is free on every plan that has Business cards.

The cards are other people’s details, so they stay in your workspace: we never contact them, and you can delete a contact and its photo at any time. Contacts are included when you download your data, and removed when you delete your account.