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Xero currently does not identify a contact as a duplicate if the contact has been archived and another one is being created with the same name.

Some people have thousands of contacts so this isn't something that we can manually check before we create a new contact.

It would be much better if Xero advised you that there was an archived contact with the same name when you are creating a new contact - then we could just restore the previous contact, and all of our purchases (or sales) would be in the same correct contact. This would also improve reporting and analysis functions.

When entering a invoice create an alert if a new contact is being in created, in case it is an error. It is too easy to make a typo without noticing and Xero will just make a new contact as default even though it's not needed.

Has the Xero Team responded on this duplication issue? It's clearly an issue that many have been experiencing.
We're a small company, but I still find duplicate records and have to go through the rigmarole of merging and archiving the duplicates.

Even if they can't make this happen, surely Xero could have a tick box so we can stop users adding a new supplier, much like we can stop them adding a new bank account.

I am hearing you on this, so time wasting to go back and have to combine cards , plus try and find activity when there are numerous card files for the same client

It is sad to see that this was raised over ten years ago and it is still an issue

It seem like nearly every user in my company has created duplicate contacts in Xero, even after coaching and training on how NOT to create duplicate contacts. The UI should be improved to help "regular users" from making this mistake.

Very annoying and time consuming to go back and "Archive" partial contacts created unnecessarily.
Also, why can't a contact just be deleted rather than "Archived" when there is no transactions against it?

It's so hard to find the history of activity when a contact is in Xero 3 times with slightly different names. I also believe there should be an ability to restrict staff from creating a new contact

The ability for only some users to be able to create new contacts would be a great choice to have. It's such a mess when clients are reconciling some of their own transactions and the who line prefills with data from the bank rec etc. One of my clients has a tonne of clients that start with 'transfer to bla bla bla'

There would need to be some mechanism to accomodate this with integrations as well. For example, if Dext creates a similar vendor name on a bill, and then that bill is synced to Xero, is it possible to create some sort of system task that I would need to resolve when I next log in to Xero for that client?

It's very hard to do a full report on the Activity for a contact when sometimes they exist multiple times due to staff changes. New contact should be restricted to high level staff.

I just had to manually archive over 2,000 contacts leaving only 420 as actual useful contacts that weren't duplicates or created due to a typo

Xero needs an option to turn on or off the automatic contact creation that happens with each new bank transaction. This is not what contacts are intended for.

Or if not possible a way to link all transactions to one default contact.

The same happens with us too and it happens too often, resulting everytime to archive the unwanted contact. It will be nice before creating Xero gives a notification. This will surely help up avoiding unnecessary steps

Seems to be taking 3 years to make this update.

Can we prioritise this - as it keeps happening and nothing has been done since 2022.

Recently noticing new contacts are being created when i'm merely searching for a contact when drafting an invoice. Definitely should require further confirmation than nudging a tab button which I habitually use to confirm my search criteria.

Just a simple "cancel" or "confirm" button would suffice, to avoid automatically creating a new contact that is a double up - very annoying!

I agree - its a massive waste of time to have merge/archive contacts that should not have been created in the first place. Does not make for very tidy ledgers!

Yes please. This is annoying as **** - somtimes typing 'expe' changes the entry to Expenses, and sometimes it doesn't. I seem to be deleting various contacts every month that are a shortened version of the word expenses.