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  1. Contacts - Allow duplicate contact names

    190 votes

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    103 comments  ·  Contacts & files » Contact  ·  Admin →
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    Not in pipeline  ·  AdminKelly Munro (Community Manager, Xero) responded

    Hi everyone, we want to thank you all for your meaningful feedback and detail of the uses you each have for enabling duplicate names for contacts.

    Right now, the contact name field is the key identifier that interacts with many other Xero features, and as such, changing how this field functions is not a small feat.

    As noted by others in the comments, some users have found adding unique characters or using the account number in the contact name useful.

    At this time we don’t have plans for developing the ability to have duplicate names of a contact in Xero. However, the work happening around core features might open the door for improvements like this down the line.

    For now, we'll keep a close watch on the support this idea continues to build, and we’ll make sure to share updates if anything changes.

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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?