best practices to enter international phone numbers

Olga Makhova

We have auto formatting set up for domestic phone numbers. We believe it speeds up phone entry, allows more accuracy, less typos, and less manual labor. Its downside is that international phone numbers are being formatted to a domestic configuration. We want to keep formatting for domestic phone numbers as most of them are domestic in our RE. At the same time we want to be able to enter international phone numbers without being formatted to domestic configuration. To avoid this we are thinking about creating a separate phone field for overseas phones --"Overseas home", "Overseas cell","Overseas Business". Another option would be to enter an international number preceded by some kind of a symbol that disables the auto format such as comma, slash (/), or 0+. We would like to know about the best practices in addressing this issue.

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Olga Makhova:
We have auto formatting set up for domestic phone numbers. We believe it speeds up phone entry, allows more accuracy, less typos, and less manual labor. Its downside is that international phone numbers are being formatted to a domestic configuration. We want to keep formatting for domestic phone numbers as most of them are domestic in our RE. At the same time we want to be able to enter international phone numbers without being formatted to domestic configuration. To avoid this we are thinking about creating a separate phone field for overseas phones --"Overseas home", "Overseas cell","Overseas Business". Another option would be to enter an international number preceded by some kind of a symbol that disables the auto format such as comma, slash (/), or 0+. We would like to know about the best practices in addressing this issue.

Hi Olga, great question!  That is correct, when we use auto-formatting for International phone numbers, the Raiser's Edge is designed to use the domestic phone number format.

You can to prevent them from being formatted to a domestic configuration, if you choose to create new phone fields for