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  1. Contacts - Allow duplicate contact names

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    80 comments  ·  For small businesses » Contacts & communication  ·  Admin →
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    submitted  ·  AdminEthan M (Admin, Xero) responded

    Hey community, thank you for your continued interest in this idea.

    Wanted to provide an update here as it's been a while since we last spoke to duplicate contacts.

    I do understand that, at face value, this seems like a quick fix. However, as the contacts screen interacts with many other parts of Xero, this work can not commence until the modernisation of other, related systems is complete. 

    Due to this, we do not expect support for duplicate contacts to be delivered in the coming short-term.

    In the meantime however, we're keen to continue collecting feedback and votes on this idea, and I will update you here as soon as there's more work to share.

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    Sarah Coxon commented  · 

    I have just started work on intigrating a clients system with xero when I realised this issue, it's absolutely rediculous, people have the same names!!

    At first I didn't believe what I was seeing... using the API to add a contact with just ContactNumber, AccountCode and Name... what I expected was everytime I ran the command it would create a new contact as I hadn't included the xero ContactID. I then thought maybe the system was being clever and recognising the same ContactNumber, this makes sense as that's supposed to be the unique identifier for the contact on our system but I tried just changing the ContactNumber and it still just overwrote the other one.

    Finally I figured out that to create a new contact I had to change both the number and the name. Number is fine but now not sure what to do, this is going to be a massive problem for us as the client has many customers with the same names.

    Would be really useful to know if there are any other fields that have to be unique to create a new contact instead of overwriting an existing one?