How to Scan Business Cards Into Contacts and Leads on Your Phone

Scanning a paper business card takes about thirty seconds, and most of that is checking what the phone read. The scan itself is the easy part. What decides whether it was worth doing is where the contact ends up afterwards: in a list you will actually open again, with a note on where you met, or in a camera roll next to two hundred other photos of cards.

This is how to do it in AtlasLinq, including the two places a scan can go wrong and what happens to the contact once it is saved.

Step 1: Open the scanner

Open the History tab. The first tile in the grid is Scan Card. Tap it and the camera opens. Before you take the picture, three things make more difference than the phone you are holding: lay the card flat on a surface that contrasts with it, find light that does not throw a glare across a glossy finish, and hold the phone parallel to the card rather than at an angle.

Step 2: Scan the front, then the back if it has anything on it

Scan the front and the card is cropped out of the picture for you. You are then offered the back. A lot of cards put a second phone number, an office address or a website on the reverse, so look before you skip it. If the back is blank or only a logo, skip it and move on.

If the card carries its own QR code with contact details in it, that is read directly rather than guessed at from the printed text. On cards that have one, it is the most accurate source on the card.

Step 3: Check what it read

The scanner fills in name, title, company, phone, email, website and address, and leaves a notes field for you. Two things are worth a second look every time.

• Fields marked low confidence. A field the scanner was unsure about says so, with a prompt to double-check it. Stylized fonts, tiny print and names set in all capitals are the usual causes. Fix them now, while the card is in your hand.
• Which number or email went first. Cards often carry an office line and a mobile, or a personal and a work email. The scanner keeps all of them and lists the others under Also found, where one tap makes any of them the primary. Pick the one you would actually call.

Then use the notes field. "Booth 14, wants a quote for the whole sales team" is worth more in a week than every other field on the card, because it is the part you will have forgotten.

Step 4: Save it, and know where it goes

Press Save Contact. The card is saved to your History with photos of both sides, so you can always check the original. It also becomes a lead in your account, with a status, tags and your notes, the same as someone who filled in the form on your own card. Meet the same person again on another day and that becomes a new lead rather than quietly merging into the first one, so you keep a record of both conversations.

Whether you can open the lead list depends on your plan. Every plan saves the scan to History and captures the lead. Reading leads is what differs: on Essential, none, but you see how many are waiting; on Pro, the 25 most recent; on Enterprise, all of them.

On Enterprise, scanned leads go wherever your other leads go. Connect Google Contacts, Zoho or HubSpot once and every card you scan arrives there automatically, which is the most reliable way to turn a stack of paper cards into contacts nobody has to type in.

How many you can scan, and where the photo goes

Essential includes 40 scans a month, which covers most people outside of trade show season. Pro and Enterprise have no limit.

The text is read on the phone itself, not by sending the photo to a server, so a card is never uploaded to be scanned. The contact you save is then stored like any other: the History entry on your phone, the lead in your account.

Where scanning falls short

Scanning is for the cards you are handed. It is slower and less accurate than the other person sharing their details with you directly, because a tap or a QR scan hands over exactly what they typed, with nothing to misread. If the person in front of you has a digital card, ask for that instead, and keep the scanner for paper. At a busy stand, the three piles for a big lead list are how to keep a day of scans from turning into a list nobody works.