Allow add multiple Contacts with same name.
It should be different crietaia to add contacts. It should allow contacts with same name , may be have different personal details. validation should not be on name.
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Dylan commented
Just noticed this on the contacts API docs: https://developer.xero.com/documentation/api/accounting/contacts
"The business rules around contacts in Xero may be changing in the future and 'Contact Name' may no longer be a unique field."
Crossing fingers...
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Richard King commented
+3 Votes from me. It's pretty common to come across more than one person with the same name. Has caused much frustration over the years.
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Anonymous commented
PLEASE MERGE WITH THIS FEATURE REQUEST: https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/4401439
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Rick Measham commented
Update for anyone reading this: Xero have said it's NOT PLANNED, but the API documentation for Contacts now has the following note which I assume means it's PLANNED or at least "UNDER REVIEW"!
The business rules around contacts in Xero may be changing in the future and 'Contact Name' may no longer be a unique field.
We recommend all developers use ContactID to uniquely reference contacts in Xero and do not rely on ContactName as a way to reference contact data uniquely in Xero.
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Anonymous commented
Sorry this remains a basic flaw.
Do any ideas EVER get PLANNED status... I am yet to find one. How many developers work at Xero is it a one man band?
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Marnus Muller commented
This is also a huge problem for us. We use the account number as unique identifier currently. So we have several customers with the same name which is making life extremely difficult to want to move over to Xero.
Even just basic info like registered company name and trading name. Why can these names not also be captured and available to show on the customized invoice reporting? -
Chris Dawes commented
Why can't we just put :
John Doe
and
John Doe (john@doe.com)
and
John Doe (Company One)would then cause a popuup form to verify if it was a name (company) or company (name)... being able to create a contact and add data immediately would be awesome.
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Chris Dawes commented
There is no logical reason why you can't have two contacts with the same name.
The HUGE limitation atm is that the info box for further info for a contact ONLY comes up after a contact is created, where if this came up before it was creating multiple contacts with same name and different email or location then becomes a sinch.
There are more simple solutions that ditching contact lookup #halfbakedidea
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Anonymous commented
Xero Developer Ecosystem comment: Does this mean what I think it means? That when one of our customers comes to us for work, we won't be able to call them up under Xero using their name? Heavens above, please tell me that once changes have eventually been made so that we can have multiple customers with the same name in our Xero records (without having to misspell their name or find a work-around using punctuation or whatever) we will be able to call up our customer records using their name plus, say, their postcode. We are a small business. All our customers are individuals. We have customers with the same first name and surname living in the same town - quite a few groups of them, all totally unrelated - and we need to be able to call up their records by their name and then a second identifier such as postcode. Losing the ability to identify a customer by their name would be a huge step backwards, not forwards.
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Bob Wiles commented
We definitely need the key entity to have potential several contacts in order to enable business quotes/invoices and/or purchase orders etc to be sent to same company (ie as the entity) but with different departments within, with different contacts. Surely this is a must to have necessity - all other packages have this feature.
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Nigel King commented
Completely agree, although there is an Account Number field in the contacts this hasn't been integrated properly into the rest of the system. I am trying to add Xero integration to an existing software system and without a unique identifier it is impossible to import sales or purchase transactions. A unique account reference is a fundamental feature of Sage and without this I cannot recommend existing Sage users to move to Xero.
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Chris H commented
I find this an extraordinary design oversight (bungle?) that you can have a major system like xero and not allow duplicate names (consider franchises, national and global client accounts).
To have imports (csv and api) that rely on a name and not a unique ID is bewildering. The coding and procedural work around required for duplicate names as a result of this very basic design flaw in xero is ridiculous.
Come on xero, lets get this basic omission fixed - both for csv imports and api
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Rob Morris commented
Without this ability, automated contact creation via the API is effectively useless. When we have two John Smiths in our system, the second one will fail potentially at a time when there is no user intervention possible (during a nightly billing script run, for example). The best solution currently is to add some unique ID to the name ("John Smith ID#188934"). Yuck.
This is a serious flaw in Xero's architecture, and is one of the issues I raise with customers who are considering moving to Xero.