Where your contacts come from

Cradle shows you names, not just numbers, by pulling contacts from whatever you've connected it to. There's no separate Cradle address book to maintain, the contacts come from the tools you already use.

The three places Cradle gets contacts from

Your work account

When you signed into Cradle with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account, Cradle picked up the contacts on that account. People you've emailed, people in your organisation's directory, and contacts you've saved manually all come across.

Your CRM and practice-management tools

If your admin has connected one of these integrations, Cradle pulls contacts from them too:

HubSpot, contacts and companies that have at least one phone number.
Xero, contacts on your Xero organisation.
XPM (Xero Practice Manager), client and contact records.
FYI, client and contact records.

You can have more than one connected at once. Cradle will show all of them in search results.

Custom integrations

If your team has built a custom integration using Cradle's API, contacts from that integration appear alongside the rest. Ask your admin if you're not sure whether you have one.

What Cradle uses the contacts for

Once contacts are in Cradle, you'll see them in a few places:

Caller ID on incoming calls. When the call comes in, Cradle matches the caller's number against your contacts and shows the name and company instead of just the number.
During a call. The in-call screen shows the matched contact's name and company.
Search. Type a name or company in the dial pad / search box and Cradle searches across every connected source at once. Pick a match to dial that number.
The call log. Past calls show the matched contact, not just the number, so you can spot who you've talked to recently.

For example, when Sarah Mitchell at Henderson & Co Accountants calls from +64 9 555 0101, Cradle shows you "Sarah Mitchell, Henderson & Co Accountants" instead of just the number. The same applies whether she's in your HubSpot, your XPM, or your Google contacts.

What information comes across

For each contact, Cradle stores enough to make caller ID and search work:

Name
Company name, where the contact is linked to one
Phone numbers on the contact

Cradle doesn't replicate everything in your CRM. It pulls the fields it needs for the call experience and leaves the rest where it lives. When you want full contact detail, click the contact's name during or after a call to open it in the source system.

When new contacts show up

Cradle keeps your contacts in sync with the connected systems. How quickly a change appears depends on the source:

HubSpot. Updates flow into Cradle within minutes. Add a contact, edit a name, change a phone number, and the change is reflected on your next call.
Xero, XPM, FYI, and your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 contacts. Cradle syncs these once a day, so a change made today won't always be visible until tomorrow.

If you need a change to show up sooner, ask your Cradle admin to trigger a resync. They can do it from the admin portal under Integrations, by opening the relevant integration's settings.

Deletions follow the same rules. A contact removed from your CRM disappears from Cradle on the next sync.

If a caller's name isn't showing

The most common reasons are:

The contact isn't in any of the systems Cradle is connected to.
The phone number is stored in a different format to the one the call's arriving in.
Two contacts share the same number, and Cradle is showing the other one.

See Why a caller's name isn't showing up for how to work through these.