Business card scanner for Salesforce
A card from the stand becomes a Salesforce lead, which is what somebody you met and have not yet qualified actually is.
Salesforce only lets an organisation authorise an application that lives inside it, so your administrator registers one in your own org, once, and gives you its key and secret. Five minutes of their time, and it leaves the credentials with you. Every other destination here can be connected by the person using it.
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 lead in your org. Last name and company are required by Salesforce on every one. The fields that make the journey are below.
Connecting it
Your Salesforce administrator creates an application in your own org, once, and gives you its consumer key and secret. You paste those in and approve the access. The person at the stand is usually not the person who can do the first half.
- In Salesforce, open Setup and go to External Client App Manager, then New External Client App. Name it CardParse, add a contact email, and leave Distribution State as Local.
- Under API, tick Enable OAuth. Set the callback URL to https://www.cardparse.com/app/connections/salesforce/callback, exactly, including the www.
- Choose two scopes and no more: "Manage user data via APIs (api)" and "Perform requests at any time (refresh_token, offline_access)". Leave Require Proof Key for Code Exchange ticked, and tick both "Require Secret" options.
- Save, then reopen the app and edit the Policies tab, which is a separate screen. Set IP Relaxation to "Relax IP restrictions".
- On the same tab, set Refresh Token Policy, and what matters is the length rather than which of the two you pick. "Expire refresh token after specific time" set to 36 months is what we use. "Expire refresh token if not used for" works as well and expires only an idle connection, where the first stops on a fixed date whichever way. Never "Immediately expire": that ends the connection as soon as the first access token does, which in many orgs is a few hours, and it looks like a fault in CardParse rather than a setting.
- Copy the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from Settings, then OAuth Settings, and give them to whoever is setting up CardParse.
- Paste the consumer key and secret into the Salesforce card and press Continue to Salesforce. Wait a few minutes after the app is created: Salesforce refuses a brand new one, and that refusal looks exactly like a wrong key.
- Sign in to Salesforce and approve the access it asks for.
- Check the field mapping. Salesforce requires a last name and a company on every lead, so a card missing either is held with a message rather than sent and refused.
There is a page to send your Salesforce administrator, covering what the app asks for, what it writes, and how to undo it.
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
- A lead rather than a contact, decided deliberately. A Salesforce contact usually wants an account to attach to, and one created without it is a private contact that many orgs disallow outright. A lead needs neither.
- The event is deliberately unmapped. The obvious home for it is LeadSource, which is a restricted picklist, so writing the name of a show into it fails unless somebody has already added that exact value in Salesforce.
- A card missing a last name or a company is held with a sentence saying so, rather than sent and refused with a 400.
What lands in Salesforce
Where a new connection starts. Every row is editable, and any field the destination offers can be a target, including your own custom ones.
- First name
- Salesforce · First name
- Last name
- Salesforce · Last name
- Company
- Salesforce · Company
- Title
- Salesforce · Title
- Salesforce · Email
- Phone
- Salesforce · Phone
- Mobile
- Salesforce · Mobile
- Website
- Salesforce · Website
- Note
- Salesforce · Description
- Address line 1
- Salesforce · Street
- Town or city
- Salesforce · City
- State, province or county
- Salesforce · State/Province
- Postcode or ZIP
- Salesforce · Postal code
- Country
- Salesforce · Country
Try it at your next show
The first 50 cards are free and need no card details. After that it is $949 a year for five users, $12 a month for each extra.