Iphone Contacts - Mac Address Book Syncing Issues

I recently noticed that my Contacts to Mac Addressbook Syncing was kinda sorta broken. It did sync some updates, but not in all cases. It was driving me crazy. I finally got some time to research it.

If you google Iphone contact sync, or search on apple forums, they all ask to reset isync, or rebuild address book. My issue was different and this did not fix it for me.

The root cause of my issue was that my iPhone contacts were getting sync to two accounts : Exchange server at work and to Address Book on my mac. Apparently when I added Exchange sync, IPhone decided to add all new contacts under the exchange account. These contacts were not getting synced to my address book.

There is how I fix it :

Tell IPhone to create all new Contacts on the Mac's Addressbook account and not Outlook.    
* On iphone, Go to Settings -> Mail,Contacts, Calendar
* Under Contacts, set Default Account to your mac

This will fix the issue for all new contacts going forward. I still have a quite a few contacts under the exchange account which were not in my Addressbook. Unfornutely Iphone does not allow to move contacts among groups or accounts. There is no easy way to export contacts out and import them under the group. Varaious online forums suggest to sync it to Addressbook/Outlook and fix the issue there. My issue was that the contacts were not showing up on my mac in the first place.

I decided to add my exchange account in address book and that did the trick. Here is how to Add Exchange account.  
AddressBook -> Preferences -> + to add a new account -> Type in my email address, username & Password.

And like magic the defaut group that Iphone has created under outlook showed up on my mac (even without syncing iphone). I was able to move the contact around to the groups in my Addressbook (family, friends, collegues, Business Associates etc).

Hope it helps you, if you are having similar issues