The Scenario
You just took on a new client — an accountant migrating their practice from a legacy system to Zoho Books. They've handed you an Excel export of their customer list: 80 contacts, each with a company name, email, phone, billing address across five columns, and a tax number. The Zoho Books org is fresh. Nothing is in there yet. The first invoice goes out Thursday.
The bad version:
- Open Zoho Books, click Contacts, click New Contact.
- Enter company name, email, phone, billing address line by line, tax number.
- Click Save.
- Open the workbook, find row 2, start again.
- After contact 15, wonder if you entered the wrong tax number for the dental clinic on row 9 and go back to check.
80 contacts is three hours of manual entry even if you don't make any mistakes. And you will make mistakes, because humans typing 80 tax numbers always do.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the contact list and creates every customer in Zoho Books directly — writing the returned contact ID back to column J so you have a record of every successful import.
Import all 80 customer rows from my Excel sheet into Zoho Books Contacts, skipping any row where the contact name is blank, and write the new contact ID into column J
What You Get
- 80 customer contacts created in Zoho Books.
- Returned contact ID written into column J for each successfully created row.
- Rows with blank contact names written as SKIPPED in column J.
- Duplicate detection: if a contact with the same email already exists, the existing ID is written to column J instead of creating a duplicate.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The billing address is in one combined column instead of split columns
Import all rows from this workbook into Zoho Books Contacts using name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C, and address from column D parsed as a single string mapped to billing address fields; write contact ID into column E
Some rows are missing a tax number
Import all rows from this workbook into Zoho Books Contacts using name, email, phone, and address fields; only include the tax number from column I if it is not blank; write contact ID into column J
Phone numbers are in inconsistent formats
Import all rows from this workbook into Zoho Books Contacts, normalising the phone number in column C to E.164 international format before submission; write contact ID into column J and the normalised phone into column C
Full client onboarding import in one shot
Import all rows from this workbook into Zoho Books Contacts using name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C normalised to E.164, billing address from columns D through H, and tax number from column I if not blank; skip rows where column A is blank; check for duplicates by email; write contact ID, DUPLICATE, or SKIPPED into column J
The pattern: ask for the normalisation, the conditional skip, and the duplicate check in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your customer list Excel workbook, then ask it to import all 80 contacts into Zoho Books in one go. See also how to post period-end journal entries or return to the Zoho Books integration overview.