What is the Contacts section all about?

We’ve built an entire section with Syft’s Review Tool that enables you to ensure you do not have mistakes or errors within your Contacts, which are your customers and suppliers. These are important aspects of your business or your client’s business and it is essential to ensure accuracy, both from a data quality perspective and potential fraud perspective.

Our tool will help you identify duplicate contacts, dormant contacts that you can archive, overdue and negative balances, and, lastly, multi-assigned contacts. These are contacts with transactions in accounts that are not their default accounts or do not have the expected tax codes. We’re excited to show you what the tool can do. Let’s dive in.

Contact is divided into the following categories:

Let's take a look at how these work.

The "Duplicates" section underneath Contacts identifies potential duplicate contacts based on the contact name in your underlying accounting provider, e.g., Xero. Contacts are analyzed across both customer and supplier data so you can identify any overlap between the two.

This tool helps you ensure you identify and avoid common pitfalls such as:

Clicking on any line item in the table allows you to expand it and show further information, including the transaction date, the account, the amount, and the transaction reference.

The "Dormancies" side tab identifies contacts with no transactional activity recorded against them for the past 3 months. You can review the transaction history of these accounts and decide whether to keep the accounts active or archive them.

Dormant contacts tend to be unmonitored, so any activity in them may go unnoticed. As such, it's good practice to archive dormant contacts.

In the Overdue & negative section, you can see information about:

In this section, you can see customers who owe you money and have done so for a long time. First, you'll see those who are 90+ days overdue, and then those who are 60-90 days overdue.

You will also see suppliers in these time brackets, neatly divided according to the supplier name, the amount you owe them and how much this amount makes up of your overdue payables.

It's a good idea to keep track of late receivables as you may need to write these off. Similarly, it's good to keep tabs on suppliers to whom you owe money, as this could harm supplier relationships in the future. You should try, where possible, to pay overdue bills as soon as possible.

In the Negative Balances Section, you can see information about customer and suppliers with negative balances. Ideally, you would not like to see any customers with negative balances as this means that you owe these customers money. This could be the result of customers overpaying or requesting refunds, for instance.

You would also not typically expect suppliers to have negative balances as this means that they owe you money. This could be the result of you overpaying. However, these are all figures you may want to investigate to verify their accuracy and follow up if necessary. This can also help you to reclassify accounts where relevant.

Syft analyzes all of your contacts and detects where there have been transactions to more than one account for a specific contact. This is powerful because most transactions with a contact should flow to a single account or single type of transaction. Thus, having the multiple account or multiple tax code view gives you insight into where there may be mistakes in your accounting data.

The Multi-assigned section is divided into two categories:

This section enables you to identify contacts with transactions assigned to multiple accounts across both customers and suppliers. You can toggle between customers and suppliers and investigate the accounts that each contact has been assigned to as well as the number of transactions and the value of those transactions.

If you use Xero and you have a default set there, this will pull through, and the transactions classified as unexpected accounts will be flagged.

If you have reviewed a contact and deem the multi-assignments correct, you can tick the tickbox next to review at the far right of the screen.

You can also hover on reviewed items to view the audit trail of which contacts have been reviewed, like so:

And you can toggle between customers and suppliers.

To find out more about each contact, click the arrow next to the contact's name to expand the information shown.

​To go to the source of a transaction in Xero, click on the little arrow next to the transaction in this expanded view.

To learn more about these tools, you can enroll in our Review Tool course on Syft Campus for free!