Enter your idea

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.