This article will walk through how contacts in your Xero account are imported into Relay when you use Relay’s Bill Pay integration.
Contact records in Xero
Contact records in Xero can have several different fields, but only two fields are important when integrating Xero with Relay for bill payments: Contact Name and Email.
Every bill in Xero belongs to a contact record. Every contact record will, at a minimum, contain a Contact Name field. However, not all contact records will contain the Email field. For more information, please refer to Xero’s documentation regarding contacts in Xero.
Payee records in Relay
Payee records in Relay store the payment information of your payees. This typically includes the payee’s account and routing numbers, as well as their name and email address.
The name and email address fields in Relay’s payee record correspond to the two fields in Xero’s contact record listed in the above section (Contact Name and Email).
How contacts get imported from Xero to Relay
When you sync your Xero bills with Relay using our Bill Pay integration, Relay automatically imports your bills as well as the contact records in Xero that are associated with each imported bill.
Here’s how this information passes from Xero to Relay:
- The contact name in Xero becomes the payee name in Relay.
- If the contact record in Xero has an email address, the email address will be associated with the payee record in Relay; and
- Any outstanding approved bills associated with the contact will show up as "Unpaid Bills" in Relay.
Duplicate payee records
When a Xero contact is synced with Relay for the first time, a new payee record is created in Relay.
This occurs even if a payee record in your Relay account already exists and shares the same name as the contact record in Xero. As a result, it is possible to end up with duplicate payee records in your Relay account after syncing with Xero. This is a concern only if you previously created payee records in Relay, and later those same records were also added after a sync with Xero.
For more information about duplicate records, please refer to the following articles:
How to import new payees from Xero
To import contact records from Xero to Relay, first make sure that the contact record in Xero has an approved but outstanding bill associated with it. Please also ensure that your Xero account is integrated with Relay for Bill Pay. Then, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
- Navigate to the Settings tab.
- Click Integrations.
- Under the Bill pay section, click Edit next to the Xero logo.
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You will have two options for how to import bills and contacts from Xero to Relay:
- If you choose to Automatically import unpaid bills and associated payees, this means that every time you approve a bill in Xero, both the bill and the contact record will be imported into Relay as a bill and a payee record. This rule will apply to every single contact record in Xero.
- If you choose to Manually select payees to import their associated unpaid bills, you will be able to choose which contact records in Xero will have their outstanding bills imported into Relay. Please note that if you choose a contact that has no outstanding bills in Xero, that contact will not be imported to Relay.
- Click Save to update your settings and initiate a sync between Xero and Relay.
Accessing your imported records
After you've synced your contact records from Xero, they will become payee records in Relay. Here's how to find your synced records:
- Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
- Navigate to the Payments tab, then select Payees from the drop-down menu.
- From your payee list, find your synced payee record. It will have the same name as the contact record in Xero, so you can use the search bar to locate it.
- Click on the payee record, and a modal will appear on the right-hand side. Click Edit.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the modal, where you should see a message confirming that “This payee is synced from Xero. To delete this payee, you can un-sync it from the Integration tab in Settings”. This is how you can confirm that you're viewing an imported record!
The imported payee records don't contain payment information. What do I do?
Since Xero contact records do not contain payment information, you will still need to update the payment information (e.g., ACH or wire details) for these payee records in Relay. You can do this by either manually entering the payment information, or by requesting the payee to provide their payment information to you.
For more information about getting payment information, please reference the articles linked below: