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Xero currently allows a Primary Contact to be assigned to a client; however, there is no way to run a report or export a list showing the Primary Contact for each client. This represents a significant limitation for accounting and advisory practices.

Why This Is Critical

1. Client Communication and Contact Lists
Practices regularly need to generate client contact lists for practical scenarios, including client communications, compliance matters, and operational outreach. Without the ability to report on Primary Contacts:
- Practices cannot easily confirm which clients have a Primary Contact assigned
- Data gaps and errors cannot be identified at scale
- Xero cannot be reliably used as the source of truth for client contact management
Manual review of individual contacts is not viable for practices with large client bases.

2. Reliance of Integrated Systems on the Primary Contact Field
Many external and integrated systems rely on Xero’s Primary Contact field, including ATO-related tools and document management systems where correspondence is automatically addressed to the Primary Contact.
When practices cannot review or audit this data in bulk, it leads to:
- Incorrectly addressed correspondence
- Increased compliance and privacy risk
- Reduced confidence in automation and third-party integrations

Business Impact
The absence of a reportable Primary Contact field creates:
- Unnecessary manual workarounds
- Increased administrative overhead
- Higher risk of communication errors
For practices managing hundreds or thousands of clients, this is a material operational failure rather than a minor feature gap

This would be a great add on for reports, we want to update orgs that don't have the primary contact box checked at all, but currently can't generate a report that lists all unchecked clients.

This is extremly important when trying to export client for mail merge etc. Without it, it makes annual complian ce communication so much more time consuming that it should be.

This would be excellent - as manually checking is just crazy when you've got such a large client list.

We are long time users of XPM and have always struggled to identify the primary contact within XPM (without manually checking records). Integrations with third party apps will bring in the primary contact, yet we can't see this easily from the XPM platform or produce from XPM reports. We've used third party apps to find this information at times which is ludicrous that XPM can't provide from their platform. XPM is not a new platform and so it's embarrassing that they've not developed their product to incorporate this for their users.
Please please bring this functionality in.

Please fix this Xero. We need to be able to identify within our data a primary contact for reporting, CRM, mail merge etc etc etc.

Would really love this as currently having to use an external program to grab data showing primary contact information which seems crazy. Would also be good if when viewing client the primary contact had a symbol confirming primary as if none ticked its obvious.

this is something I am also chasing as we don't want to have to review every client manually to see who has this tick box, ticked to show who is the primary contact for the client. Really needs to be addressed. Even if it is changed from a tick box to a yes/no question, then you would be able to pull a report based on that answer. Easy fix.

Yes this would be great. We use other integrated software that uses primary contact but the only way we can check the data for this is to check every client which is not possible given our client base.

I have asked for this on many occasions over the past 5 years. It would be great to see this implemented.

Our firm would greatly benefit from this functionality

Great idea

This feature would be greatly beneficial to our firm

please put this in place as it is required by our firm

Echo Rhyl's comments below

This is an essential feature when trying to integrate Contacts with third party apps that need to pull the correct set of Contact information (mobile, email, salutation) to deliver meaningful correspondence. It was also be useful to be able to bulk update to set the Primary Contact as well.