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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.

We started putting in clients middle initial to alleviate the 'same name' problem. We now have had some clients with the same middle name so we are having to put a symbol in their name. It is getting very messy with regards to alphabetical order. Would love to have same name problem sorted soon please Xero?

Theres is a field called ACCOUNT NUMBER in Zero. It has to be unique, why not make it a mandatory field and use that? Then we can have as many John Smiths as we need.

I have customers in Australia with identical names...yet Zero still think names are unique...come on it 2022!

Concatenated primary key of fname, lname, email perhaps?
I'll bet the John Smiths of the world feel picked on by Xero

We have many customers with the same name and our system is automated so we have to manually intervene to ensure that the correct customer is invoiced.

Any updates so far? We need it urgently so solve our invoicing issue or else Xero will lose many customers from this issue

Our business deals with a lot of individual customers

We have many customers with the same name and have to invent different ways to create contacts, e.g. John Smith, Mr John Smith, Mr. John Smith, Mr John Smith.. etc. etc.

It would be more useful for each contact to have a unique id number and the name field unrestricted.

Sub account is something quickbook has and it works great for multiple retail locations under 1 parent HQ or 1 MNC with multiple departments.

It should be an easy implementation and hope Xero can do this asap!

Unique customer number/alpha key please. Think of the many "John Smiths" out there with different address's

Please add a unique key to the contacts. It makes data import so much easier. Trying to match on an exact name is very problematic

Please add a unique key to the contacts. It makes data import so much easier. Trying to match on an exact name is very problematic.

We have a number of customers with the same name but do not have the same account. Surely the account number should be the unique key rather than the name?

It is mad that the contact name needs to be unique. Would still need to have a primary key on the database would contact name along with postcode be the right way to do it?

Would be extremely helpful to have the option to add the same contact name.

Absolutely a must...surely clients could be separately identified with either address, unique client code (both of which contact details list separately in our systems) or something rather than name...

We are continually having issues with ezyVet syncing financial information to our Xero account.

Every month, we get sync errors arrear as there is already a contact with that name in Xero. Due to our large database, it is not uncommon to have 2/3 clients with the same name who are not the same person. To get around this we are going to the duplicate name and adding an asterisk or similar but that does not look very good when printing statements etc.

When adding a client to ezyVet they all get their unique six-digit number which easily identifies them. It would be fantastic if Xero could read this number and recognise that they are different clients.