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Also have the same issue. To be honest I dont even understand what's the actual benefit of using something like "name" for uniqueness. There can be multiple people having the same name in a real world scenario and this just makes everything error prone. The contacts already have an ID that is unique.

Having the same issue. We can go and manually add a title or middle name as part of the first name which sort of works, but since we import quite a lot of contacts through CSV files it just updates old contacts automatically and if we are then resending old invoices to chase payments it causes issues as now the address is wrong. We catch some manually but not all.

It also means that some customers pay over eway and request a receipt, it goes to the email on file. We've had customers demand refunds because they thought we took payment from their account due to being sent invoices for payment someone else with the same name has made.

Customers are also often concerned that payments they have made have gone towards the wrong account and will be chased for payments again in the future.

It really is a major flaw that needs to be fixed, I hope there's an update soon.

Has anybody at Xero done anything at all to resolve this simple, but fundamental database design issue? Just needs someone to remove the unique index on the Customer_Name field. The field can still be indexed (non unique) and there should be no performance impact on read operations and theoretically a slight improvement on write operations as the uniqueness check is no longer performed.

I have the same issue

For some time now, I have been experiencing an issue with contact records in XERO.

As I understand it, XERO will not allow what it considers to be duplicate contacts based on name alone. For example, if I add a customer called Mr Michael Smith, and then a few months later need to add another customer with exactly the same name, XERO will not allow this because that name already exists.

As a workaround, I might create the second contact as Mr M Smith. If I then need to add a third customer with the same name, I might use M Smith. The problem is that this only works for so long. Eventually, I run out of sensible variations, and it becomes increasingly difficult to add genuine customers who happen to share the same name.

Because the contact name appears on documents, it does not seem appropriate or professional to name customers Mr Michael Smith (1), Mr Michael Smith (2), and so on.

Is there any way for XERO contacts to distinguish customers by name and address together, rather than by name alone?

I am sure this must be an issue for many XERO users, as it is entirely possible to have multiple customers with the same name, each living at a different address.

I would be grateful if you could let me know whether there is a better way to manage this within XERO, or whether an update could be considered to resolve the problem.

Can Xero create a unique ID number for each contact? It's fine for us to have an account number for our contacts, but a Xero unique ID would be really helpful workaround for duplicate names AND bulk updates of customers via import and export.

I'm not the only B2C business who has multiple identical customer names and you can't have more than one of the same name in Xero. To overcome this, all that needs to be done is when creating a new contact, the account number is the unique identifier and is the CONTACT, but it shouldn't be visible in the name & address part of the invoice. The customer name and account number should both be searchable.

The contact name field is coming up as "Contact name must be unique", which is limiting when it's entirely possible there's more than one person with the same name.

Can Xero find a solution to this? If other attributes, such as email address, are unique?

How do other people get around this scenario?

Hello Xero developers. Do you have any updates in 2025? Please email me directly if you have.

This is an incredible limitation of Xero. The unique identifier on a contact should be the AccountNumber field - not the name field!
The documentation does not make this limitation very clear. Worse, when adding a contact with the same name as an existing contact via API, there is no warning message. Xero effectively merges contacts leaving a horrible mess of invoices, payments etc amalgamated to the same contact. I see this issue has been unresolved for at least 10 years, which is quite stunning really for such a large company with an army of developers.

I strongly echo Sonia Mitchell's comment that duplicate names and same EINs would create a 1099 nightmare at year-end. Is there no emphasis on keeping your books organized and kept up-to-date, so much so that ALLOWING duplicate contacts seems a reasonable solution? NOT ALLOWING duplicate contacts would be the ultimate goal.

This is an embarrassing limitation.

Thoughts?

I'd really like to upvote this as essential please due to the fact there are many Jane Smith's who would be customers.
Building any database record set on Name seems incredibly short sighted or simplistic. Databases need unique ID's for EVERY person for many, many reason and this being a very big one.

That is why we have unique payroll numbers, medicare numbers etc etc. Is Xero's primary key Name? Surely it can't be can it?

Is the fix really to have Mrs Jane Smith? Jane Smith? Jane Smith@? Jane Smith6? Jane Smith7?

Any database software uses primary and foreign keys right? If we could use them and import them to our systems that would be better to match and import on.

Or simply allowing us to create and External ID field in Xero that we could then populate our proper primary key from our systems into to match would be a pretty quick fix.

I'm a bit shocked to be reading that this has been an issue for so long and Xero bases everything on name...

Any relational database model dating back decades uses the premise of a unique number identifier surely.

Display names are already a functionality in Xero Practice Manager - it needs to be added here as well.

We might have multiple projects going for the same global client - we need to be able to send invoices to different email addresses but same overall client name.

duplicate names and same EIN numbers create a 1099 nightmare!

Yes, "display name" is a good idea.

I'll have retired and stopped using Xero before anything regarding this is implemented.

Hi All,

Seems like it's been a while. I don't think a systematic change is required on the backend.

We just need to add an additional field for name (e.g. Official Name) that has no unique criteria, and it can be used as an option on the invoice.

The invoice (or bill, purchase order, etc) is where where we find it problematic because its what the client sees and our clients require their "official" name on invoices to process, but we keep track of clients by departments or business units, so we cannot just put them all into one contact.

I think this would be an easier fix.

Hi

Can we get this fixed please, we have many customers with the same name and it’s becoming impossible to get them enter in zero, there’s only so many commas and full stops you can add

Hi team,

Just facing a problem with xero as I'm wasting time inserting clients into the system. The reason is, as we have clinets that are working for the same company, but as we need to bill them separately, each time that I have a new client, even though is working for the same company, we still need to create a new account.

For this reason, I was asking if there would be an option to duplicate the contact and then modify the primary contact and email address. So in this way we would save a lot of time.

Thanks
Bruno