Business card scanner for Pipedrive.

How it works

Somebody on your stand photographs a card with the CardParse app. The card is parsed into named fields, anything the parser is unsure about is flagged for a person to check rather than guessed at, and the contact appears in your dashboard.

A person in your Pipedrive company. Turn the lead option on and each card also gets a lead titled with the company, linked to that person. The fields that make the journey are below.

Connecting it

Press connect and approve CardParse in Pipedrive. If you are in more than one Pipedrive company, the one you are signed in to is the one that gets connected.

Scanning works with no signal. Cards queue on the phone and upload themselves when the connection comes back, which matters more at a trade show than anywhere else: a hall full of people is a hall full of phones fighting over the same cell.

Automatically, or when you say so

Each destination is set to one or the other. Automatic means every card arrives within seconds of being scanned, with anything flagged for review held back until somebody confirms it. The alternative is that nothing leaves on its own: you select the contacts you want on the contacts table and press send, whenever you are ready.

Which one suits depends on the show. A stand qualifying as it goes usually wants to check before sending; a stand collecting as fast as it can usually does not.

Worth knowing

• Leads are off by default and can be turned on per connection. Pipedrive cannot hold contact details on a lead itself, so you get the person either way and the lead points at it.
• A lead is created only on a card’s first sync. Correcting a phone number a week later updates the person and does not make a second lead.
• Company name is deliberately unmapped. Pipedrive links a person to an organisation by numeric id, not by name, so a default would be sending a word where a record reference belongs. Map it to a custom field if you want the text.
• Job title and note are unmapped for the same reason: Pipedrive documents both as present only when the company has contact sync enabled, so a default that works in our account would silently drop them in yours.