Managing Your Contacts

Understand how eg2 uses contacts to filter data and authenticate customers.

2 min read

In eg2, a contact is an email address. It serves two purposes at once: it’s how eg2 delivers the login code to your customer, and it’s the key eg2 uses to decide which rows that customer can see.

How Contacts Work

When you configure a tab, you choose a contact column — the column in your spreadsheet that identifies each customer. Every row where that column matches the logged-in customer’s email address is shown to them. Every other row is hidden.

This means:

  • You don’t maintain a separate contacts list in eg2. Your spreadsheet is the source of truth.
  • If a customer’s email address appears in 10 rows across multiple tabs, they see all of those rows — and nothing else.
  • If you remove a contact from the spreadsheet and the portal syncs, that customer will no longer have data to view after logging in.

Adding Contacts

Add contacts by putting email addresses in the contact column of your spreadsheet. No setup in eg2 is required — the next sync picks them up automatically.

Format:

The contact value must match exactly the email address the customer will use when logging in — including capitalization.

How Customers Log In

Your customers never create a password. When they open the portal link:

  1. They enter their email address.
  2. eg2 sends them a 6-digit one-time code by email.
  3. They enter the code and land directly in their portal.

The code is valid for a short window. After logging in, customers remain logged in on that device until their session expires.

Verifying What a Contact Sees

From the admin panel, you can preview the portal exactly as any contact would see it:

  1. Open the portal in the admin panel.
  2. Use the View as dropdown at the top of the portal preview to select or type a contact.
  3. The preview updates immediately to show exactly what that customer sees.

This is the fastest way to verify data before sending the portal link to a customer, or to investigate a support question.

Contact Not Found

If a customer logs in but the portal shows no data, it means no rows in the spreadsheet match their email address exactly. Check:

  • That the contact column contains the exact email address they used — no extra spaces or different capitalization.
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