How do you keep on top of your customer and supplier relationships? Look no further than your email.

For small businesses, email is a critical communications tool. With the advent of mobile technologies, small businesses in all industries can stay in touch with their business while working on the go. They use email to stay in touch with what’s happening with their customers and suppliers whenever it’s convenient.

When email is more than communication

In fact, according to research, around 75% of a business’ intellectual property is contained within email. What does this mean? Most of your key information including documents, commitments and general updates all end up in email.

This includes the context around your customer relationships. Whether it’s a quote, a complaint or a suggestion, it’s likely it’s been sent by email.

As a small business owner, the trick is to not only keep on top of these communications, but to keep track of that information as well.

After our Gmail integration, we’re proud to announce that Xero now integrates with Office 365. This integration allows your email messages to or from a contact to be seamlessly accessed in Xero alongside their financial transactions. Here’s how email integration works in Xero.

Liberating your email with Xero + Office 365

If you use Office 365, you can now connect Xero to your Office 365 account. Next time you look up a contact in Xero, and click on the Email tab, you can see your email communications with that contact. This helps you stay on top of what your customers have been asking from you.

But there’s more to it than just viewing emails. If a contact has emailed you about a quote, you can initiate a new quote right from within Xero. It will even attach the original email as a record.

And if they’ve confirmed an order, you can just as easily kick off an invoice too. Your workflow is simplified, you can respond to your contacts’ needs quickly and easily.

If an email contains an attachment, you can add those to your contact’s record too. It’s easy to store attached documents – such as proposals and contracts – in Xero. This makes them available when you look up that contact’s record. Xero really becomes your system of record.

Similarly, if they are commenting or complaining about something you can do something about that too. Add the email message to the contact’s activity record in Xero so that whenever that contact is accessed in the future, there’s a record of that comment available, so you can react accordingly.

By integrating email, Xero becomes more than accounting software. It becomes a service that helps bring together everything you need to run your business. We make it easy to stay on top of what’s happening.

And now, by now supporting the two leading global email platforms, we’re giving businesses multiple ways of staying on top of their relationships.