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This is frustrating indeed and so unprofessional. when you print invoice to send it will have Joy Foot 4 .... wow. and then i have to keep looking up to see which one i am invoicing to make sure I sent to right Joy!
A account no. will be precise as the field to record people in contacts with. e.g. if i had a field acnt no. and i input 350458 - it would pick up the right Joy Foot and address etc... without the client needing to see Joy Foot 3 or 4.

why is this so difficult? i come from a basic programming background and this is the easiest field to add?

Unfortunately, I just raised the same issue with Xero Support and got this response "If you would like to add 2 x customers with the same name, we would recommend naming them differently to one another for example 'John Doe 1 and John Doe 2' or whatever you have in mind."

Why not simply make the Account Number mandatory (unique) as well, and then it's solved??

Makes life so much easier. It would help to have duplicates of most things.
Products, Invoices, Contacts

Hi. It is very important for us to be able to create duplicate client names in Xero. Any other accounting package I have used has allowed this feature. It would be greatly appreciated if this could be resolved without adding additional characters to names etc.

we can keep chipping away at it another 100 eh :)

all they have to do is add a reference ID field which becomes the main identifier rather than the name - that way no matter how you spell the clients name or make error in typing etc., through the main ID field can show all entries under it.

we need more votes. get everyone in your companies to put in a vote that have a log on!!! and friends and family who use it!!!

Don't hold your breath,this issue was first raised maybe 12 years ago and Xero has done nothing to address it.

Hi. Our customers are mostly universities. Some of the faculties in the same university are viewed as different customer even though they are from the same university. The purchase order will require us to use the same university name but the contact person will be different. Our challenge:

1. When we update the contact to the latest contact and the latest contact will receive the receipt rather than the previous contact.

2. We are constantly updating the contact person for the same university.

Agree that the ability to have multiple contacts with same name should be allowed and that the account number should be the unique identifier as long as it allows alpha &/or numerical. We have at times 10-15 contacts for one company and if we could have this functionality in Xero it would save quite a lot of time and avoid any errors. Currently every time we do an invoice, purchase order or a quote we have to go into contacts change the contact name and when emailing the client we have to manually enter in the email address (due to only 5 contacts being allowed).

We are from Asia, so we have more difficult than Western and Europe because most personal name are exactly same.

We have a number of customers with same billing address but multiple delivery addresses. I've voted / commented on this in the past but can't see my comments in the list below

Yes, I agree, the combination of full stops looks extremely unprofessional

I agree with a lot of the comments on this post. The 'Account #’ should be the unique identifier.
And the account number needs to be alpha &/or numerical.

We have many contacts for the same organisation each for different aspects of the business. Not having this feature is creating a lot of headache.

Along with duplicate contact names, it would be helpful to be able to add additional contact to a company. For example, if I'm working with, and billing two different departments, I need to utilize the same address with a different attention to name.

Critical in order to integrate with other software.
Causes a major problem for Clients and ends in an unprofessional looking name being used in order to ensure it's unique.
There are lots of John Smith's in the world!!

I would like to know the progression for this as it is causing a problem for me. we have online orders, each customer has their own record, so as far as Xero is concerned we can only have one customer with a name and no-one else can have that name!

We use Xero to track our Child Care families and entering the same contact information except for child name is so time consuming. It would be great to duplicate address/phone etc and just change the Account Name!

Xero, why can’t we use the ‘Account #’ as the unique identifier? The field already exists and it already has to be unique, just make it mandatory and use this!!

Its not just about contacts having the same contact and trading name but with different addresses (like headoffice/branch situation), the main problem here is that Xero is an international accounting software and there are many many thousand John Smith's in this world, and Xero users should be able to create multiple John Smith clients or suppliers which ever is the case. Xero's CRM system needs to properly reflect the needs of current everyday businesses. Simply putting another full-stop in the contact name field - which then so unprofessionally appears on any invoice/statement etc that you generate is just totally wrong.
Surely contact name could be the same but the system require a unique account number be allocated to those contacts.
Or have the contact name used like an internal-use name/client nickname but that all documents generate contact information from new fields set up especially for the Company Name, a tick box to show the contact is an individual and therefore addressee appears as Mr/Mrs Smith etc.
This problem has been an issue since Xero was developed XX years ago. Should have been a much higher priority than given to date.

since the invoice is printed to ship out with, having dots or numbers etc looks a bit ridiculous or even unprofessional as customer sees this as mistypes etc. :)

since address field is different in its content it should allow same names. in cases where entry is being made with no address details i can understand the relevance of the confusion with same names in the backend program and mixup of records. however, perhaps assigning a ID to each customer might help? ID can be entered by end user e.g. we have debtor nos. that can be entered on top and if this is diff for each it is irrelevant what the client name is...?

We have the same contacts but with different matters. It would be easier to copy a contact than filling in the same information each time.