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I never paid attention to this before but obviously know this feature from every other accounting software and im developing a software which needs access to the account number. it should be auto-generated when adding a new customer. Please look at this asap

Come on Xero - is 50 votes enough to get this done?
You can see how much trouble this is causing folks, and there'll be a lot more people for whom this is an issue that haven't voted because they haven't seen this tread.
Please automate the generation of account numbers like you currently do for invoice numbers etc.

Also, another feature missing related to account number is when you are doing a bulk import you cannot target the import based on account number. This should be treated as key field as it should be a unique number to then allow for data import.

I find data import by customer name sometimes has issues with names being clipped and new accounts created due 3rd party system exports messing up the customer's name for longer entries, but when the list is huge no one is going to go through each one to check.

really important to generate automatically in same format

Account numbers can help, currently we don't make use of it, because the bank recon chooses the amount on the statement. All we do is to choose the correct contact.

I want to be able to add two names for a contact.
The registered name as well as the Trading name.

This would be very helpful. I agree it is annoying not knowing what the next account number is.

All contact types should default to an assigned account number.

It would be great if the number is auto assigned but I have the option to overwrite. The same as invoice number.

Thanks for those comments Rob.
So the 'Account Number field is a text field? Interesting.
If so, that might prevent another idea we had . . . . .
As there's no automation of account numbers, I was thinking about creating an Excel list, and then seeing if we could import the numbers from there into the account number fields. If we could do this just once - to populate all contacts with a unique number - that would be a great start, after which manually adding new ones wouldn't be such a chore.
Any idea if there's a way to import Excel data into the account number field?

Invoice numbers

Would be useful. Also:-

- Ability to set the current/next number to be allocated, so if Xero gets this feature, then when you add new contacts, it will generate the account number from the current account number, not "1" etc.

- Account number prefix, e.g. in invoices etc you have "INV-" by default. Have an optional prefix would be useful where you need to match it up with other systems (i.e., it indicates where the account comes from if you have multiple systems where accounts could be.) or possibly if you've imported from an old system or taken over another company's customers/accounts, it would let you identify those customers.

It might be useful to have each account prefix/number generated from either the branding theme or group when initially creating the account.

I think it's because the account "number" is not actually a number at all, but a text field to support importing from other systems. We used to be on Sage a few years ago, then Quickbooks for a while. Sage set the account number to some 8 character tag based on the account name, so "Best Company Ltd" would be "BESTCOMP" by default. Once the account was created, Sage didn't allow you to change it if the company ever changed names. The account number was BESTCOMP forever.

Now let's say you import data from a couple of other systems. It would be useful to be able to set a prefix at this point to identify where it came from and to ensure it is unique in Xero (e.g. is account "1038" on one old system, the same as "1038" on another system?)

Xero please can you auto generate account numbers for new contacts

Come on Xero - please get this done.
You automatically generate sequential invoice numbers so the functionality already exists within your software. Please can we have this applied to the 'Account Number' field so it will auto-populate with a new sequential account number every time you add a new contact.

This would help our clients and I would like to see this idea initiated.

Agree. This automation should be standard really. Xero can already auto-generate sequential numbers for quotations, purchase orders, and invoices, so please extend this so it can also auto-generate sequential account numbers.
It would also be super useful to be able to 'retrofit' this to existing contacts, so that if a user decides to apply account numbers when they already have hundreds of contacts, Xero will roll them out sequentially across the whole contacts list. Please do it Xero. We need this badly.

It is very important to have auto-generated account number for a new contact