To help small businesses and their advisors improve customer relationships and cashflow, we today announced Live Contacts in Xero.

Live Contacts is a new way for small businesses and advisors to better manage customer and supplier information, by linking and enriching information of millions of businesses into their accounting platform. Delivering a complete customer record.

With smart address verification to check information at point of capture, this helps to improve the user experience, reduce costs and ensure data accuracy. Getting accurate address data at the point of entry, reduces the need to clean it once it’s in your company database. By validating business records against a range of data sources it will give small businesses, up-to-date information about their customers and suppliers.

We’re taking the work out of adding new contacts. Reducing data entry, enriching the data we hold and making easy work of adding new contacts in Xero. We’ll suggest the business you’re looking to create and auto-fill their information including business name, address, ABN/NZBN, industry classification and much more.

In the future, as we add more data sources, it will ensure the records of millions of small businesses are always up-to-date. For example, if a business changes an address or phone number we can instantly notify and update the records held by their customers or suppliers. The quality and detail of the information provided will give small businesses a complete, current customer picture, helping you focus on running and growing your business.

Contacts in Xero already integrates directly with some of our largest partners, including Google Apps for Work and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Allowing small businesses to see their email communications against their contact records, showing a full picture of their relationship. Bringing email out of the inbox into their business processes.

The introduction of Live Contacts will enable further innovations to make small businesses more productive. For instance, Xero customers will be able to search for a plumber in their vicinity that uses Xero and easily contact and do business with them, exchanging invoices and payment through their accounting dashboard.

Commenting on the announcement, Craig Walker, Chief Technology Officer at Xero, said: “Xero was developed to help its global accounting partners and small businesses do beautiful business. That means empowering our community with rich data that can inform better business relationships, decisions and risk management.

“We’ve re-imagined Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the cloud as up to date public information of all companies is available. Rather than each small business maintaining their own information about customers and suppliers, they can now link to company information maintained by Xero and partners. This is just the start of what we can do.”

These announcements were made at Xerocon South, Australasia’s largest accounting technology conference, bringing together more than 2000 accountants, bookkeepers, financial professionals and exhibitors from Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

A Xero press release