Copper — the CRM formerly sold as ProsperWorks — authenticates with a pair of headers: X-PW-AccessToken carries the key and X-PW-UserEmail carries the address that owns it. That leftover "PW" prefix is a hint at how long the scheme has been around. It also means a Copper API key on its own is useless: without the matching user email every request is rejected. That is why the Copper card in Anexus asks for two fields instead of the usual one.
The two values Copper asks for
You need a Copper account on a plan that exposes the API, and you need to be signed in as the user whose email you are going to hand to Anexus.
- API key — generated per user inside Copper, and shown to you exactly once.
- Account email — the address that same Copper user signs in with. Not a shared inbox, not an alias, not your billing contact.
Because the key belongs to a person rather than to the Copper account, whoever generates it becomes the owner of everything the integration creates — new records will show that user as the "Created by" user. Pick someone who is going to stay on the team.
Step 1 — Generate the API key in Copper
Sign in to Copper as the user whose email you plan to use, then open Settings (the gear icon in the left-hand navigation).
Go to Integrations, then API Keys.
Click Generate API Key. Copper reveals the key once — copy it before you close the dialog. There is no "show it again" later; a lost key is replaced, not recovered.
Keep that user's sign-in email to hand. It is the second value, and it has to be the login address of the same person who just clicked Generate.
Step 2 — Paste both values into Anexus
In Anexus, open Settings → CRM Integrations and click Connect on the Copper card.
Enter both fields:
- Copper account email: the address you sign in to Copper with, for example
you@company.com - API Key: the key you just generated
Click Save & connect.
The card turns green and shows your Copper account. From that moment on, every new contact captured from a tap, a QR scan, a Wallet pass or a shared link is pushed to Copper as it arrives.
Where a captured contact lands: People, not Leads
Anexus creates a Copper Person. Copper keeps People, Companies, Opportunities, Projects and Leads as separate objects with separate list views, so a synced contact shows up under People — it is not added to your Leads list and it does not become an Opportunity in a pipeline. If your team works inbound out of the Leads list, that is far and away the most common "where did my contact go?" moment on Copper.
Field mapping
What an Anexus captured contact becomes on the Copper Person record:
| Anexus field | Copper destination | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Person → Name | Copper holds a Person's name in one field rather than splitting first and last, so whatever the visitor typed arrives intact. |
| Person → Email, category work | A Copper Person can carry several addresses, each tagged work, personal or other. This one lands under work. | |
| Phone | Person → Phone number, category work | Only written when the visitor actually filled the field in. |
| Job title | Person → Title | Free text in Copper — it is not validated against a list, so job titles stay exactly as typed. |
| Company name | Person → Company | Only written when the visitor filled the company field in — whatever they typed is what arrives. |
Anything the visitor typed into the message box, plus the note recording how they reached you — NFC tap, QR scan, Apple Wallet, shared link — travels with the contact too. Contacts submitted without a usable email address are skipped before they ever reach Copper rather than being pushed as broken records.
Copper and Gmail
Most teams pick Copper precisely because it runs inside Google Workspace: the Chrome extension puts Copper in a Gmail side panel, and Copper ties into Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive. That has a useful side effect once your captured contacts start arriving.
Once the Person exists in Copper, the Copper panel in Gmail recognises them the next time they email you — a card tapped at an event turns into inbox context without anyone typing it in.
Troubleshooting Copper
"Copper rejected the credentials"
Check that the key and the email belong to the same person. Copper validates the pair, not the key on its own: the address you enter must be the sign-in email of the Copper user who clicked Generate API Key. Group addresses such as sales@company.com, mail aliases and the billing contact will not work. Sign in as yourself, generate a fresh key, and reconnect with your own address.
It worked, then stopped after a staffing change
Copper API keys belong to a user, not to the account. Deactivate or remove that user — someone leaves, a seat gets reassigned — and every key they created dies with them. The Copper card in Anexus will start failing its Test even though nothing on the Anexus side changed. Have a current user generate a fresh key, reconnect with that user's email, then click Sync past contacts to push anything captured during the gap.
"My contacts aren't in Copper" — you may be looking at the wrong list
Copper's Leads list and its People list are different objects with different views and different filters. Anexus writes a Person. Instead of scrolling one list, search the contact's email address in Copper's global search — if the Person comes back, the sync worked and the only question is which view you were in.
A large "Sync past contacts" run only partly lands
Copper rate-limits its API per key. A one-off backfill of a few hundred contacts can hit that ceiling, and Copper answers the surplus requests with a rate-limit error, which Anexus shows verbatim on the card. Nothing is lost: the refused contacts stay pending. Wait a few minutes and click Sync past contacts again to pick up the remainder.
The key is accepted but the write is refused
Copper permissions follow the user's role. If the person who generated the key has a restricted role, Copper accepts the credentials and then refuses to create the record, so the card reports a permission problem rather than a bad key — a useful distinction, because regenerating the key will not fix it. Ask a Copper admin to widen that user's permissions, or generate the key from an account that already has them.
Duplicate People in Copper
Copper flags possible duplicates rather than blocking them, and the match is not always caught — the same person filling your exchange form twice with a slightly different address will produce two People. Copper's merge duplicates tool combines them.
Disconnecting and revoking the key
Click Disconnect on the Copper card in Anexus to stop the push. People already created stay in Copper untouched. To kill the credential itself, go back to Settings → Integrations → API Keys in Copper and delete the key — worth doing as well as disconnecting if the key ever left your hands. As with generating one, a deleted key cannot be restored, only replaced.
What's next
- Back to all CRM integrations — what syncs, what needs a manual backfill, and how tokens are stored