Don't type personal details, such as a client's name.

Contacts: Clients Who Come Back

Keep each client's DS-160 forms together under a contact with their name and email, see their filings and Application IDs, and find forms that belong to the same person.

Clients come back: a renewal, a new trip, a spouse’s visa. A contact is the client a form is for. Every form of theirs links to them, so one page shows their forms, filings and Application IDs. Use this guide to add contacts, link forms to them and find people who already have more than one 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 is on their forms.
  • One contact per form: a form is for one person. A contact can have any number of forms.

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

  1. Open Contacts in the sidebar, under Groups.
  2. Click New contact. 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 contact’s page lists 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.

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.

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.

  1. Click Review on Forms that may belong to the same person.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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.
  • A form is missing from a contact’s page. It is linked to another contact, or to none. On the form’s overview, click Change or Link to a contact.