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This is critical for us small businesses - please instigate a process for allocating contacts as Supplier / Customer / Both. Really need this.

Yes this would be helpful when after entering say a new supplier into Contacts, then you have to go back in to update a field - and this is before they have issued you a bill. To do this you have to search for them under 'All' as they do not appear under 'Suppliers'. Annoying as most of the time you search under 'Suppliers' then realise you have to change to 'All'

It would be extremely helpful to have the ability to manually designate a contact as a Supplier without being required to create a bill first.

Currently, contacts default to being labeled as Customers unless a bill is entered, which can lead to confusion and disorganization — particularly when dealing with vendors that don’t issue traditional invoices.

For example, when recording a Spend Money transaction (such as a business purchase from Amazon), the payee appears as a Customer, even though they are clearly a Supplier. This makes it difficult to maintain accurate contact categorization and reporting.

Allowing users to manually set or edit the contact type (Customer, Supplier, or Both) would improve clarity, organization, and accuracy — especially for businesses with mixed transaction types or suppliers that operate on a cash basis.

Customers & supplier contacts should be split. In most companies you have a debtors clerk and a creditors clerk, should you have a trainee starting with quotations for example - now the debtors clerk trainee has access to both instead of only the field required. This opens the door for complications and errors posting a quotation to a creditor instead of a debtor. The company I work for has clients that are both our creditor & debtor, the confusion is unnecessary.

Come on Xero, this is fairly basic. Add a checkbox to the contact info where the contact can be designated as a supplier, customer, or both.

Wow, this is nearly three years old this thread and you still can't manually assign a contact as a supplier or a customer - unless I'm missing something?

These is an essential feature missing.

Please fix - or let me know if there is a way? Thank you.

I integrate with HaloPSA - Clearly a supplier in Xero (only has bills) has because a customer and not a supplier in HaloPSA. It's becoming unmanageable now that we're growing...

Adding my support to be able to manually change a Xero defaulted customer to supplier and vice versa. I've got a supplier that has hundreds of bills against them and only a couple of invoices (for small amounts as parts of a claims process) and they're catergorised as a customer. Crazy there's no override in the contact edit page!

Add new field to able to classify or tag suppliers and contacts by category/type for easy searching and reporting e.g. recruitment, employees, stationary, legal, Government. This would really help with our procurement procedures.

We are using minutedock to do our timesheets and to enable it to sync to Xero I have selected customers opposed to bringing all my suppliers in as well. The issue is I can not add time without creating an invoice first in which is really quite frustrating.

Custom categories for customers would enable us to look at what sectors are generating the most revenue. In my business, this is valuable data that is currently time consuming and prone to human error.

I’m a new user. I have imported contacts from elsewhere but not invoices or bills. So it is essential to be able to designate contacts as customers and/or suppliers directly.

I am trying to use an integration between Xero and Halo PSA and am running into this same issue. They filter and only list Xero "Customers" for potential import which makes perfect sense... until I add a new customer to Xero that I haven't billed anything to yet. Because I haven't billed them yet (post-paid billing), I can't import them into Halo PSA properly to track my time and efficiently generate a first invoice. The automagic categorization of contacts seems like a convenient default, but please add some way that we can manually override whether they are a customer, vendor, or both.

It is ridiculous that you cannot correct a vendor that is showing up as a customer.

We would like to move a contact to the customer (or supplier) list when we create the contact. Or at the very least, Xero automatically move a contact to the customer list when a quote is raised. Thank you

@Kelly Munro surely receive money transactions should cause a contact to be classified as an entity that sends me money ie a customer?

This is an issue, I have entered an 'invoice' on a supplier in error before and once realised and you get rid of it, it then puts the supplier in the customers list. They should be completely separate as ledgers not under one heading as 'contacts'

I find that xero doesnt do a very good job of identifying which contacts are which it would be nice to be able to specify.

I was having the same problem integrating with MOSS, they couldn't locate Supplliers that were listed only as Contacts in Xero. Spend Money Transactions weren't enough for Xero to recognise the Contact was a Supplier.

I found a workaround... By creating a Dummy Bill with xero value, this triggered Xero to recognise this Contact was a Supplier.

I presume the same would work if you created a Dummy Invoice - this should trigger Xero to recognise the Contact is a Customer

This seems like such a simple feature. The system gets this wrong quite a lot and it would be really help to fix. Especially for US tax reporting.