The Scenario
Your company acquired a regional distributor last month. The integration checklist has one item that has been sitting unchecked for three weeks: create all 55 of the acquired company's customers as Xero contacts in your instance. The sales team prepared the contact data in an Excel workbook — company name, email, phone, billing address, account number — one row per customer. Invoicing is scheduled to start next Monday. Today is Wednesday.
The bad version:
- You open Xero, go to Contacts, click New Contact, and start entering row 1: company name, email, phone, address, account number, tick the customer checkbox, save
- By contact 10 you realize you have been copying addresses from the Excel row above by mistake — three contacts have the wrong address
- You finish all 55, notice two company names were so similar you entered the same customer twice, and now need to merge or delete the duplicate before Monday
Fifty-five contacts is exactly the number where manual entry produces errors and the errors surface at the worst possible moment — during first invoicing.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the contact table and creates every Xero contact in one operation — name, email, phone, address, account number, and customer flag set correctly for each row.
Open your customer onboarding workbook and try this prompt:
Create a Xero contact for each row in the Customers worksheet starting at row 2 — use company name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C, account number from column D, and set each as a customer — write the resulting Xero contact ID into column E
What You Get
- One Xero contact created per row, with the name, email, phone, account number, and customer flag from your workbook
- Any row where a contact with the same name already exists in Xero surfaces in the Status column — no accidental duplicates
- The Xero contact ID is written back into column E — giving your sales team a reference for invoicing
- Rows that fail (missing required field, invalid email format) surface with a reason rather than failing silently
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some rows are missing email addresses — flag before creating
In the Customers worksheet, check every row for a blank email in column B — write "Missing email" in column F for those rows — for all rows where column B has a value, create a Xero contact with name, email, phone, and account number from columns A through D, set as customer, and write the contact ID into column E
You need to assign account numbers sequentially if they are not already in the workbook
Create a Xero contact for each row in the Customers worksheet using name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C — assign an account number to each contact as "ACQ-" followed by a sequence starting at 1001 — write the contact ID and assigned account number into columns D and E
Some acquired customers are also suppliers — set both flags where appropriate
For each row in the Customers worksheet, create a Xero contact with name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C — if column E says "Both", set the contact as customer and supplier — if column E says "Customer", set customer only — write the contact ID into column F
Validate the full worksheet, create all clean rows, and produce a completion report
In the Customers worksheet, check each row for missing name, email, or phone — write "Incomplete" in column G for those rows — for all complete rows create a Xero customer contact with name, email, phone, and account number from columns A through D, write the contact ID into column F — after processing all rows, write a summary in the Summary worksheet: total rows processed, total created, total skipped with reasons
One prompt covers validation, creation, writeback, and the summary report.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your acquisition onboarding workbook with Xero connected, then ask it to create all 55 contacts before Monday's invoicing run. You might also want to read about bulk creating Xero invoices from an Excel workbook or exporting the Xero contacts list for CRM import.