Contacts

In Xero if you click the Contacts button you'll see a list of all of your contacts broken up into Customers and Suppliers at a bare minimum.

Xero has also introduced Groups and Smart lists now as well - we'll cover off these things in the sections below

Contact Groups

Groups allow you to create your own segments of contacts. We're going to create a group called "Pays on Time"

To do this, once in the cotacts section click on "New" next to "Groups"

In the window that pops up, enter the group name then click on "Save"

The group will now show under the "Groups" section

The last step - is to add your great paying on time customers into this list. To do this, go back to your customer list and select those customers first.

Once you have selected them click on "Options" then "Add to Group"

In the window that pops up, select your group and then click on "Add"

Thats it you're done!

Now - why may you want to do this? Once you've added a contact to a group you can do things such as export that group and use it for email marketing - or - do things such as send statements to only that group of customers.

This can be very useful for example if you have a bunch of customers that you may issue statements to on certain days of the month for example - or if they are customers that buy a particular service from you.

Contacts - Smart Lists

If you tried out the example above you probably realised pretty quickly that it can be tedious to go and select EVERY customer that you'd like in a group.

That's where smart lists come in. Smart lists allow you to segment your customer list based on different criteria.

Contacts - Smart List Example

To create a new smart list the process is very similar to creating a contact group. Next to Smart Lists click on "New"

Note that this time instead of being asked to name a group, you'll be taken straight to the smart list criteria section as shown below

On this page you can now create criteria for your smart list. Once you click on "Add a condition" you'll be able to see the various options available for creating a list

For this example we're going to create a list of customers that have purchased a medium black T-Shirt.

Once you've created your list click on "Run Search" to make sure it will return some results.

In our case we can see we've got two results

Why use Smart Lists?

Xero has some pre-built smart lists primarily designed to help with identifying overdue invoices - but it is much more powerful then that.

If you are using Products & Services in Xero you can create searches that will show you when people last purchased an item or if they purchased more than a certain amount. This can be used to market new products or encourage additional sales of items to your existing customer base.

You can also use it to find customers you've billed from a particular location - great if you'd like to run a marketing area in a particular suburb.

The above are just some examples, we'd recommend trying the feature yourself to see what other great and useful lists you can come up with!

I still need help!

If you need assistance with creating and using tracking categories remember you can email or phone us.