How to import your customers’ numbers from iPhone and Android in five minutes

Your customers' numbers today live on the manager's phone, the salesperson's phone and an old spreadsheet. The directory gathers them in one place the company owns, not individuals — here is how.

From an iPhone

Open Contacts → Lists → long-press "All Contacts" → Export. You get a .vcf file; mail it to yourself or save it to Files. The file carries everything the way the phone stored it: every number with its label (mobile, work, home), e-mail, company and address.

From Android

Contacts → menu → Manage contacts → Export → to a file. Also a .vcf. Some devices write Arabic names in a special encoding — AurCard reads it and restores them as they were.

From Excel or Google Sheets

Save the sheet as CSV or upload the Excel file directly. Column order does not matter: AurCard recognises the name, number and e-mail columns and shows you its guess so you can correct it.

The review before saving — this is the difference

From Numbers → Import upload the file. Nothing is saved yet. A screen tells you, for every row: ready, format corrected (05 became +966), duplicate of someone already there, or unusable — and why. Excel numbers that lost their leading zeros are refused rather than turned into a stranger's number. You are the one who presses "import".

What happens to a person with three numbers?

They are saved with all three and their labels; the primary number for messaging is the one the phone marked preferred, else the first mobile. You can change it later with a star on the customer's page.

What importing does not mean

Importing stores numbers; it does not mean you can message them with offers at once. Marketing messages need consent on record for every number, or the "notice to existing customers" mode on its terms — and even that refuses freshly imported or unrelated numbers. This protects your number before it protects your customers.

After importing

Open Duplicates to merge anyone saved twice, and file people into Groups ("branch customers", "suppliers") so the right messages reach them. Anyone deleted by mistake comes back with one click within ten minutes.