Contacts: Clients Who Come Back

Clients come back: a renewal, a new trip, a spouse’s visa. A contact is the person a form is for. Every form of theirs links to them, so one page shows their forms, filings and Application IDs, and their next form can start from their last one. Use this guide to add contacts, link forms to them, find people who already have more than one form and, for employees and students, take a company’s or a school’s answers from a colleague’s form.

Before you start

Who can use contacts: anyone in a business workspace. A personal account keeps its family together in My family instead.
What a contact holds: a name you choose and, if you like, an email. Everything else about the person (their date of birth, nationality and passport) is read from their latest form each time their page opens, and is not copied anywhere.
One contact per form: a form is for one person. A contact can have any number of forms.
Credits: a new form made for a contact uses a form credit, like any other new form.

Contacts and groups

A contact follows one person over time. A group holds forms filed together for one trip, such as a family or a tour. They work side by side: a family’s group holds four forms, and each of those forms is linked to its own contact.

Adding contacts

Open Contacts in the sidebar, under Groups.
Click New contact. Choose Person or Organisation, give it a name and, if you like, an email, then Create. The contact’s page opens.

You can also start from a form: on a form’s overview, click Link to a contact, then choose A new contact for this form (its name starts as the form’s) or Someone already in Contacts. On the New DS-160 form page, the Contact section links the new form as soon as it is created.

Example: how this looks on the platform

Once a form is linked, its overview shows a line such as Contact: Ana Popescu · Forms: 3, with Change and Remove. Removing the link leaves the form and the contact as they were. The Forms list shows each form’s contact under its name, and the Contact filter shows one person’s forms.

A contact’s page

A person’s page shows:

From their latest form: their name, date of birth, nationality, the last four characters of their passport number and when it expires. A passport that expires within six months is marked.
Organisations: their employer, treaty enterprise or school, if you add one (see below).
Forms: every form of theirs, newest first, with when each was started, when it was filed, the visa classes filed for and the CEAC Application ID.

Example: how this looks on the platform

Edit renames the contact or changes its email. Archive hides it from Contacts and leaves its forms linked; Show archived finds it again and Bring back restores it.

Starting a person’s next form

On the person’s page, click New form for and their name.
Check the form name. It starts as the contact’s name.
Choose what to copy. The new form is a copy of their latest form, without this trip’s sections (the travel page and travel companions), which a new trip answers again. Tick Copy this trip’s answers too to keep them.
Click Create form. The form opens, linked to the person.

If their latest form’s passport expires within six months, a warning says so: ask for a scan of the new passport before filing. A person with no form yet gets a blank one. The latest form is never changed.

Finding people who already have forms

The first time you open Contacts, DS160.io compares the workspace’s forms and lists those that seem to belong to the same person: the same passport number, or the same name and date of birth. Demo forms are left out.

Click Review on Forms that may belong to the same person.
For each suggestion, check the forms, then click Same person to link them all to one contact (a new one, or the contact some of them already have), or Not the same person. A suggestion you turn down does not come back for the same forms.
Click Look again later to compare the forms again, after new ones are added.

A form’s overview also says when it looks like a contact you already have, with Link to and the contact’s name.

The comparison reads the answers when it runs and keeps only which forms belong together, never the passport number, name or date of birth that matched.

Two contacts for one person

On one of the two contacts’ pages, click Merge and choose the other. Its forms move to this contact, and it is archived with a link to the one it was merged into.

Employers, treaty enterprises and schools

An organisation is a contact too: an employer, an E-1 or E-2 company, or a school. Linking its people to it lets a new form for one of them take what the organisation shares from a colleague’s form.

Add the organisation on the Contacts page, as an Organisation.
On each person’s page, click Add to an organisation, choose it and what it is to them:

Role	What a new form takes from a colleague’s form
Employer	The employer’s name, address and phone on the Present Work page, and who filed the petition and the U.S. employer on the Temporary Work page
Treaty enterprise (E-1 / E-2)	The company pages of the E-Visa supplement: business profile, foreign parent, finance and trade or investment, personnel, application contact and U.S. employer
School	The school, course of study and address on the SEVIS page, and a J-1’s program number

Only answers the new form does not have yet are filled, so a person’s own answers always win. A salary, duties, a start date, a petition receipt number and a SEVIS ID are never copied: they are the person’s own. After Create form, a note says how many answers came from the organisation; check them before filing.

An organisation’s page lists its people and what it is to each of them.

The weekly contact expiry email

Once a week, owners and admins get an email listing the contacts whose latest form’s passport expires within six months, and those whose last filing’s visa may be due for renewal. Each person is listed once for each event, in the week it comes due.

Visa dates are estimates. DS160.io never sees the visa that was issued, so it counts from the filing date and the usual length of that kind of visa (ten years for a B visa, for example). Reciprocity can make a visa shorter: check the visa itself.
DS160.io never writes to the applicants. Whether to get in touch is up to you.
On or off: the email is on by default for visa agencies and off for immigration firms. Owners and admins change it in Workspace Settings, Client intake, Contact expiry email.

Troubleshooting

There is no Contacts item in the sidebar. Contacts are for business workspaces. In a personal account, use My family.
A suggestion names two different people. Click Not the same person. Twins who share a name and date of birth, or a passport number typed on the wrong form, can look the same.
New form for is missing. The contact is archived, or it is an organisation. Bring it back, or open one of its people.
The page shows no date of birth or passport. Their latest form has not answered those questions yet.