Scan a Paper Card into Your Phone and CRM
Every drawer has them: the cards you collected at an exhibition, a site visit, a meeting, and never typed into your phone. AI Contact Capture turns that pile into contacts. Photograph one card, check what was read, and it lands in your phone and in your CRM. This guide covers the whole flow, what each button does, what a scan costs, and what happens to the photo afterwards.
What AI Contact Capture does
AI Contact Capture reads someone else's paper card and turns it into a contact you own. It is the opposite direction from the AI vCard Builder, which photographs *your* card and builds *your* digital profile. Capture is for the cards other people hand you. One photo produces a saved contact in your phone, a record in your CRM, or both.
It reads Arabic and English cards, and bilingual cards that carry both. A Jordanian card printed with an Arabic name on one side and a Latin transliteration on the other comes back as one contact, not two half-read ones. The address stays in Arabic and renders right to left in the review form.
Who it is for: anyone who collects cards faster than they file them. Sales reps working a stand at an exhibition, procurement and account managers coming back from site visits, agency owners after a pitch day, and anyone who has ever photographed a card in their camera roll and then never looked at it again.
Open it and read the credit counter
Open Scan a card in the left sidebar of your dashboard, between CRM and Wallet. The page is one card headed AI Contact Capture, with your remaining AI credits in the top right corner.
A scan costs 1 AI credit, and it is only charged when the read succeeds. If the photo comes back with nothing usable, no name, no phone and no email, you are told to retake it and your balance is untouched. Credits come from your plan or from a booster pack; accounts on an unlimited allowance see the word Unlimited instead of a number.
If your balance hits zero the uploader is replaced by a short panel that says you are out of credits and links you straight to buying more, or to upgrading if your plan carries no AI allowance at all. Nothing else on the page changes.
Step one: photograph the card or upload an image
Take a photo opens your phone's rear camera directly, which is the fast path when the card is in your hand. Upload image opens your file picker instead, for the photos already sitting in your camera roll or a scan someone emailed you. Both feed the same reader.
The accepted formats are JPG, PNG or WebP, and the uploader asks for images up to 8 MB. Very large photos from a modern phone camera are fine; anything beyond roughly 12 MB or 30 megapixels is rejected before it reaches the reader, so downscale before retrying if you hit that.
One card per photo. Lay it flat, fill the frame, and keep the light even; the on-screen tip says the same thing. A card photographed at an angle on a dark table is the single most common reason a read comes back thin.
The moment you pick the image, the uploader is replaced by "Reading the card..." and the request goes out. There is no separate submit button. It usually takes a few seconds.
Step two: review the eight fields
The reader returns eight fields, all editable: Name, Company, Job title, Phone, Email, Website, Social links and Address. Phone, email and social links can each hold more than one value, so a card printed with a mobile and a landline gives you both, and a card carrying an Instagram and a LinkedIn gives you both of those. Handles are expanded into full URLs. Nothing is saved yet at this point.
The review step exists because no reader is perfect on print. A stylised logotype, a foil-stamped name, a phone number split across a decorative rule: these are the places a machine guesses. Fixing a character here costs you five seconds and saves you a wrong number in your CRM forever.
Company cards get special handling. If the card carries an organization name but no person, the reader recognises the company markers (Co, LLC, Group, Bank, Insurance, and their Arabic equivalents such as شركة and مؤسسة) and moves the value into the Company field, leaving Name empty rather than filing the business as a person.
Three buttons sit under the fields: Save to phone, Add to CRM, and Scan another. They are not a sequence. Use one, use both, or use neither and scan the next card.
Save it to your phone
Save to phone is available on every plan, including the free one. It builds a standard .vcf contact file and your phone opens it with its own Add Contact sheet. The file is named after the person, so an Arabic name downloads as an Arabic filename rather than a row of dashes.
The file is written as vCard 3.0, deliberately, because iOS and iCloud reject version 4.0 on import. Long Arabic lines are folded at the 75-octet limit the standard sets, without ever splitting a character in half, which is what makes an Arabic name import cleanly into Android contacts instead of arriving truncated.
Any social links you kept are written into the same file as extra web addresses, so the Instagram or LinkedIn profile printed on the card travels into the phone contact alongside the website rather than being lost with the card.
Phone numbers are reduced to digits before they are written, and Arabic-Indic numerals (٠١٢٣) are converted to 0123 first, so a GCC number printed in Arabic digits survives instead of vanishing. Invisible direction-control characters are stripped from every field, which stops a copied-in character from reversing how a name displays later.
On iPhone, read the orange note. Safari opens the vCard in a preview sheet, and the Done button at the top does not save anything. You have to scroll down and tap Create New Contact. The page shows this warning automatically when it detects an iPhone, because it is the one step people miss.
Add it to your CRM
Add to CRM needs a plan that includes the CRM. On plans without it the button is visible but greyed out with a padlock, next to a link to the plans page. The scan itself and the save-to-phone path still work; only the CRM write is gated.
The contact needs at least a phone or an email to be added, because that is what makes it a real identity rather than a name floating in a list. If both are empty you are asked for one before the button will write anything.
Scanning the same card twice does not create a duplicate. Identity is resolved email first, with phone as a secondary key, and the existing contact is updated instead of copied. A phone number is never used to silently merge two different people who happen to share one, which matters for a family business or a shared reception line.
The contact lands with First touch: Scan, so scanned cards never masquerade as web traffic in your source reports. A Scanned card entry is written to the activity timeline carrying the company and job title, and all eight fields are kept on that entry, social links included, since the contact table itself stores identity only. Lead scoring starts from there as the person engages.
From the contact page you get everything the CRM gives any other lead: WhatsApp, email and call buttons, a Download vCard button so you can pull the contact to a phone later, the AI insight panel that drafts a first message, deals, tasks and the lead score.
What happens to the photo
The card image is deleted the moment the text has been read. It is stored briefly so the reader can open it, then removed, whether the read succeeded or failed. ScaanMe keeps no library of the cards you scanned and no image is attached to the CRM record.
This is worth knowing in both directions. It is the right default for a card someone handed you in confidence, and it also means you cannot go back to the original photo later to check a digit. Fix the fields on the review screen while the card is still in your hand.
Each scan writes a usage line against your credit balance and a scan event recording the detected language, whether the read succeeded, and where the result went (phone or CRM). That is your own audit trail, not a copy of the contact.
Getting a clean read
Light beats resolution. A card photographed under a window with an older phone reads better than the same card under a desk lamp with a new one. Glare on a glossy or foil-finished card is the worst case; tilt the card slightly away from the light source rather than moving the phone.
Fill the frame with the card and keep its edges parallel to the frame. Cropping tight removes the tabletop, the neighbouring cards and the coffee cup, all of which are text the reader has to discard.
If you get "Could not read that", the credit was not spent. Retake the photo rather than uploading the same file again. If a specific card fails twice, type the two fields you actually need into the review form by hand and save it; a partial contact beats a card that stays in the drawer.
For a stack, work in a rhythm: photograph, glance at the fields, save, tap Scan another. The page returns to the uploader with the previous contact already written, so a drawer of thirty cards is a single sitting rather than a data-entry afternoon.
Common questions
Does this work on Arabic business cards? Yes. The reader handles Arabic, English and bilingual cards, detects which language the card is in, and keeps Arabic values in Arabic. The address field renders right to left in the review form, and Arabic names are written into the vCard in a way iOS and Android both import correctly.
What does one scan cost? One AI credit, charged only when the read returns something usable. A failed or unreadable scan costs nothing. Accounts with an unlimited allowance are not metered.
Can I use it on the free plan? Yes, for the save-to-phone half, as long as you have AI credits. Adding the contact to the CRM requires a plan that includes the CRM. The scan and the vCard work either way.
Do you keep the photo of the card? No. The image is deleted as soon as the text has been extracted, on both success and failure. No card image is stored on the contact record.
What if I scan the same person twice? You get one contact, not two. The existing record is matched by email first, then phone, and updated in place. Two different people who share a phone number are not merged.
Can I upload several cards at once? Not yet. It is one card per photo, one photo at a time. Use the Scan another button to move straight to the next card without leaving the page.
I tapped Done on my iPhone and the contact is gone. That is Safari's preview sheet, not a save. Scan the card again and this time scroll down inside the sheet and tap Create New Contact. If the contact was also added to your CRM, it is still there and you can download the vCard again from the contact page.
Does the scanned person get contacted automatically? No. Nothing is sent to them. The scan writes a contact and a timeline entry in your account, and every follow-up is something you choose to send.