Enter your idea

And today, another price increase. What extra are we receiving in exchange for the increase? AI perhaps?

I would prefer to see the needed improvements that we customers are asking for!

Take it easy everyone; they've been working hard providing us with useless AI features and superficial UI updates that no one asked for.

Plus, it's only been almost 20-years to the day since the company was founded, not really enough time to implement this kind of change.

Silly is definitely an understatement - embarrassment is more like it.

It feels like a `drop unique index` + update validation rules kinda fix tbh.
I'm sure its not, but also... should be fixable in a timeframe much less than the many years we've been waiting for it.

Silly is an understatement. There already is a unique customer id in Xero. They just need to use it as the key for contacts.

This is really getting silly now. As others have said, there are only so many times you can butcher a name to make it unique - and when sending invoices out it looks really unprofessional if you have full stops after a name or reference numbers/email addresses after the name. Not all customers have middle names. This could be solved by just having a unique customer number instead.

Oh for heaven's sake! I appreciate that this might not be the simplest thing in the world to resolve but we have been waiting YEARS for this problem to be resolved and there were Xero users who had been waiting for years before us. This is absolutely ridiculous. We have SO MANY customers with the same name where we have had to add a full stop or two full stops or three full stops or four full stops after their name just to be able to raise a customer invoice that we've lost the plot and the simple ability to differentiate between customers without a major investigation into our customer list - and that's without us having to "butcher" customer names so we have for example Dave and David or James and Jim or Phillip, Philip, Phil, Phill, etc. It's only a matter of time before a Xero user innocently falls foul of GDPR and data protection because the basic function of facilitating customers with the same name still does not exist within Xero. PLEASE GET THIS SORTED.

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.

Hi Xero Support, we have 2 clients carry exactly the same name (eg. both of the client's full name is ALVIN CHUA), understand that Xero contact name serves as the unique identifier for individual client, we just want to know do we allowed to create 2 different contacts for exactly same name (eg. create twice for ALVIN CHUA) in Xero but identify them as different contact via contact account number (eg: HMC001 and HMC011)? And, for invoice import template, possible that Xero help to change the mandatory contact name to mandatory contact account number instead? Contact account number as unique identifier in invoice template better serve us for now and in future as we may have more and more clients carry the same name as the company grow.

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?