Most small business owners rely extensively on email communication with both customers and suppliers. This can be anything from sending invoices to customers, ordering from suppliers, requesting info or a quote on a new product, updates to price lists, customer and supplier agreements, enquiries from potential new customers etc etc.
Most small business owners don't have a dedicated CRM system in place so these emails back and forth live in the inbox of the person sending the email which makes it really difficult for anyone else in the team to know where things are up to with the contact.
A few weeks back I wrote a post detailing why it's important to have all your contact info up to date in Xero.
Besides the need to have the correct information about your customers and suppliers, it's also important so you can link your emails to your contacts.
Why connect your emails to Xero?
For visibility in one spot.
It's really hard to get an entire picture of your customer just from your Inbox. It doesn't tell you how much money the customers has spent with you, if you are owed any money, or even what has been ordered or done for that customer in the past. It's also really hard to just look at Xero in isolation and get an entire picture of your customer. Sure you can see the finance transactions but nothing to do with issues, things in progress, or any correspondence.
But with both your email and Xero data combined you can start to get a really good picture of your customer. Not to mention your team can also have the same picture as they can see emails between you (note this is not automated, you set the emails that the entire team can see).
It's not just being able to see things, it's also great for an audit trail. You can add a quote straight from the email in Xero and it will attach the original email as part of the quote.
Connecting Gmail or Office 365 to Xero
It's fantastic to see these features inbuilt in your accounting software. No need to have multiple apps, no need to ever lose an email to or from your customer or supplier again.
As always if you are stuck setting this up let Beau in our office know. He can help with everything from setting you up on Gmail to connecting your emails to Xero.
